Ep7 is what happens when you hand $200m to a slightly talented fanboy.
I’ve seen it four times now, and each time I’ve focused less on the callbacks, which are essentially just grounding, and more on the characters.
It’s absolutely true that the first Star Wars has more magic where the action & set pieces are concerned, but the characters (including Han) don’t have arcs, dialogue, or fresh personalities this good in any other Star Wars movie but Empire.
That’s what keeps me coming back. Well, that & John Boyega makes me understand how my mother felt about Mark Hamill in 1977.
He turns it into a couple of billion? Cool
It is a movie about space wizards. A fun one.
I watched the film on Friday. And this is going to seem absorb to some of you: But I had almost no knowledge of film going in. I didn’t watch any trailers, as I never go to the cinema. I didn’t read any threads, because I never go in the movie section on QT3 or reddit etc. I genuinely didn’t even know the name of the film other than “Star Wars episode 7”. In general I don’t follow movie news, as I hate most movies. Infact I’d stopped caring about Star Wars anyway as the prequels were shit, the EU is retconning fan-serving shit, there’s only a few good computer games, which means in general Star Wars is shit. Also Lucas is shit. Infact I think that’s the thing that makes all the other things so bad. (re: Lucas didn’t make Episode 7. I didn’t even know that until I was booking the cinema tickets the night before…)
But my girlfriend wanted to watch Star Wars, and had been harping on at me since its release date to go and watch it. Weirdly, she’s never seen the original trilogy (or Indiana Jones – I think she’s allergic to Harrison), but saw the prequel (including Ep2 about 5 times because her local cinema was empty, cheap and Christian Haydenson is a hunk from the perspective of a 16 year old girl). So we watched the OT last week. Naturally, rather than borrow any DVD or Blu-Rays off of some friends I downloaded the despecialised editions, mainly because Han Shot First* and I didn’t her first impression to be that CGI dinosaurs are all over the place and that Jabba goes from being shit CGI to a cool puppet. I really recommend the despecialiseds, by the way, though finding the “correct” and “best” one to watchable them took me hours. (Pro-tip: an 72gb film with 20 audio tracks is excessive and won’t play back smoothly on my TV). So we eventually watched all of those, and something magical happened:
I thought Star Wars was cool again!
So cool infact that I even googled a few things, like “So when did Darth become a title!?” and read a bunch of wookiepeida to satisfy my lore-curiosity. Interestingly, it turns out all of the EU is no longer semi-canon. It’s now completely non-canon! Take that, thousands of authors that were ignored by Lucas! But I ended up ordering Gillen’s “Vader Vol 1” TPB and even “Star Wars Legends Epic Collection: Infinities Volume 1”, mainly as I wanted to read “The Star Wars”, which are comics someone wrote based off of Lucas’s original script where Vader and Annikin Starkiller were two different people. (I’ve yet to read them).
So all in all I went and saw The Force Awakens, slightly excited for what awaits me!
And you know what? It wasn’t shit! Star Wars was fun again and no longer about back-flipping quad-saber-wielding Jedis scanning Jar Jar binks for his midi-chlorian levels. I left the theatre very impressed, and I’m actually thinking about seeing the movie again. I don’t think I’ve ever been to a cinema to see something twice before – that’s how impressed I was.
Thing is though, I was utterly confused about WTF was happening in between ROTJ and TFA. The opening crawl was fairly useless, I thought. I couldn’t figure out why the rebels/resistance were still around and the Nazis were still able to build super weapons without any problems. So I spent all of Saturday reading wookipedia. And then for some reason I spent most of Sunday reading this thread, skipping past the huges walls of text about Mary Sues or how Luke really was trained for multiple weeks by Obi-Wan!!! etc etc. I read it as I didn’t want to repost stuff, but now that I’ve read it I’m not really sure why I read it, as it’s entirely full of crap.
(Ps, if anyone cares, 4 years of WAR after ROTJ the New Republic eventually “won” and made a peace treaty with the bits of the Empire that were still left. The Empire fled to unexplored regions of space, and much like Germany in WWI promised to disarm and be peaceful. Then, much like Germany in WWII, they ignore the peace-treaty and tooled up with hilarious super weapons, as all of the old Star-Destroyer factoires were itching for something to do. The Resistance is because the Republic are all full of Neville Chamberlains who believe that there will be peace in our time, and Leia is the doubtful Churchill.)
So here’s some stuff I wrote down,before reading the thread, but after reading all of wookiepeida. Even though each point has been said before, I’m hoping that by posing it we’ll extend the Mary Sue trained Luke debate until Episode 8 comes out. ps: I’m glad to see that people were as upset about no one hugging Chewie as I was.
[ol]
[li] It’s basically A New Hope again, which is odd, as ANH isn’t even original. So is it doubly unoriginal? I guess most stories are unoriginal, as that guy made a list of all 30 different story types. But this goes a bit too far… ANH was “Save the princess, thwart the evil dude, explode the castle”. This is so unoriginal that it’s got a a map in the droid, the evil base with a ANH trench run AND an Empire style core-shootin’! Plus the Starkiller base is absurd. What happens when the sun runs out? They just go build another one somewhere?
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[li] I had to look up on wookiepedia to actually understand the difference between The Rebels, The Resistance and The Republic. The opening crawl sucked at explaining things.
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[li] Storm troopers are cool again, and not CGI! Storm FlamerThrower! Storm Riot Sheild! Storm Heavy Machine Gun! Storm Sanitation Engineer! Storm Cilivian Slaughter! It’s like battlefront or something. I wonder how you get to be one of the special classes?
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[li] Storm troopers are actually real people beneath the helmet. I assumed they were all Vader like and had machinery all over their faces. I also thought that Captain shiny was a) a Dark Trooper b) Male. So I had no idea it was Brienne of Tarth until my girlfriend pointed it out on the way out – she recognised the voice. I had absolutely no idea.
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[li] Why do the rebels/resistance persist in attacking with like 5 xwings at once and 3 dudes at once? Why not, like 100 ships and a couple of squads at least?
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[li] Finn appears to be in desperate need of some human contact. Didn’t people hold hands or hug in Stormtrooper Training Camp? I thought athletes and military types were always getting too close and physical?
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[li] I totally knew Kylo Ren was alluding to kill Han when talking to him. However I assumed he’d just push him off the bridge. I’m not sure which Han death is better? (Though both would be just as ignored by the film…)
[/li]
[li] How could Ren be so good with the force, when Luke sucked? Maybe the lightside had been hidden for so long that it was itching to get back into a useful human or something?
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[li] Bit too much abuse of warp speed in this film? Like, in all of the old films it’s something you do to travel between systems and took a decent amount of time to calculate and what not. Now you can just flip levers and warp-speed out of the hanger bay and terminate it centimeters before a line of trees on a planet and somehow not end up in the middle of the planet. Couldn’t the resistance just warp into Nazispace every now and then for a scout-about and figure out that they’ve built a giant gun into the side of a planet before it fires? They found out about the death star before hand, now suddenly this planet sized weapon is a surprise? It would take a few hours to get round each planet in the entire galaxy with the way warp speed is now depicted?
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[li] Speaking of which, what’s the Falcon made out of? It got scraped along sand, rock and smashed into trees and didn’t get dented in the slightest. Is this Star War’s answer to the space debris problem: The ships are just tough as? Or is this like a crashing a Ferrari in a computer game? Disney says w’ere no allowed to see the Falcon dented as that’d ruin it’s branding?
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[li] What’s the deal with Snokes? There were only two Sith, and in theory the entire Sith faction died with emperor and Vader. Was he a hidden Jedi/Sith? Or someone else Luke trained that went bad? Or just a random other force user that evaded the emperor’s culls? I guess we’ll have to tune in next year to find out!
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[li] How did Han and Chewie just bumble into the falcon whilst freighting around with those monsters? Infact how did the gangs find Han’s ship with on problem, etc? It used to be hard, in the OT, to find other ships.
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[li] In general there were far too many “coincidences” for my liking.
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[li] Han gives Finn a plastic Space-SA80.
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[li] Why didn’t silver captain trooper just tell them to fuck off? I thought stormtroopers are meant to be happy to be a bit of cannon fodder for the glory of their space racism?
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[li] How could people see the big bolts of starkiller? (Wookiepedia tip: The woman on the balcony who clearly looks like she’s named, given the way she’s framed in the shot, is named in the fiction!)
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[li] Chewie, after landing, was more worried about plodding along with Finn and the medical staff, than about Leia? Or even just crying himself to sleep on the Falcon? Still, he’s probably doesn’t cry at the loss of a comrade, as the prequels retconned him into being a Wookie General.
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[li] What’s up with r2d2 waking up? Does he sense the light saber is back on base or something?
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[li] Why didn’t Leia train in the force? She did in EU/legends? I thought Luke vaugely offered in ROTJ?
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[li] Kylo Ren is a member/leader of the “Knights of Ren” – in the flashback he clearly has a posse. Where are those guys? I guess this isn’t a Sith “Rule of Two” crap anymore? Can we expect more of these angry youths in distort-o-masks?
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*Actually I first saw Star Wars on VHS in the early 90s, so he was shooting second at this point.
And actually replying to this thread:
Luke wasn’t so Paladin-like in Jabba’s palace. I think Luke had always struggled with the dark side and his emotions. Why are Jedis and Sith so obsessed with being one side or the other? Why can’t someone be force-neutral and just use both powers?
And two other loose ends from reading this thread that don’t have a specific thing to repy to.
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Vader sucks bolts into his hand at the dinner table on Cloud City, so Kylo Ren freezing them isn’t that much of a stretch?
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ROTJ is the best movie. Ewoks rule, even if them defeating “The Emperor’s Best Legion” with a few logs is completely and utterly absurd.
(The other post was too long or the forum, so this is separate. Which means I’m now in the gurugeorge/Any Bates/Leinad club of posting way too much about The Force Awakens.)
I pretty much agree with the premise here, that they did a lot of copying. But I’m OK with it. To quote myself:
The idea behind this movie was clearly “give the people what they like,” rather than “break new ground.”
I don’t think The Force Awakens suffers because it’s so similar to the older movie, though. Perhaps that’s just my nostalgia talking, but I don’t mind new takes on an old formula as long as it was a good formula in the first place. And I had no complaints about the actors, production, and writing on this movie. They did a good job making the old formula hold up in a new age, and there’s plenty of opportunity for future films to work on breaking some new ground.
I’m not quite at the Pod-level of being impressed, judging from all the thought he’s clearly put into this. :) But I think The Force Awakens did an admirable job of being the bridge from older fans to a new generation, and all the similarities is major part of how they pulled that off.
Episode VIII has started filming.
The studio announced that Laura Dern is in Episode VIII.
The Resistance is a tiny force on a shoestring budget—what Leia can scrape together from her own assets and from a few sympathetic people in the Republic.
Speaking of which, what’s the Falcon made out of? It got scraped along sand, rock and smashed into trees and didn’t get dented in the slightest. Is this Star War’s answer to the space debris problem: The ships are just tough as? Or is this like a crashing a Ferrari in a computer game? Disney says w’ere no allowed to see the Falcon dented as that’d ruin it’s branding?
I thought this was actually kind of cool the second time I thought about it—if you have a ship that can stand up to reentry the way that Star Wars ships do, it’ll have to be pretty tough.
Han gives Finn a plastic Space-SA80.
His blaster is an old Mauser pistol dressed up, and stormtrooper guns from the original trilogy are Sten SMGs. :)
How could people see the big bolts of starkiller? (Wookiepedia tip: The woman on the balcony who clearly looks like she’s named, given the way she’s framed in the shot, is named in the fiction!)
There are rumors of a deleted scene featuring her, too, which also goes into the nature of the Resistance a little bit more. If that’s true, then it’s the one major gripe I have with the editing/directing from a storytelling standpoints.
I knew this! And Chewie’s large rifle in ANH in an MG34 dressed up.
The scene I was thinking of in TFA was when Han/Finn are talking about the aliens on the table that are going somewhere and Finn could go with them. Finn goes to hand back a gun, and Han says “keep it”. It’s not Han’s pistol, but it definitely looks like some plastic bullpup type gun up close.
This is the best image of the prop I’ve found.
This is the toy version:
Unlike the guns in the original trilogy. All the guns in TFA were scratch-built rather than being real weapons banged together with additional bits of stuff.
Just found these myself:
http://www.figures.com/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=307887&stc=1&d=1450967722
Doesn’t look exactly like I remember, nor much like the IRL gun I thought it was :’( (It could be an SA80 with window dressing, no magazine, and a shorter stock… and a completely different trigger/magazine position :P more likely something else or entirely made up)
edit: You second image link doesn’t work, for whatever reason. Here is he clickable version for the white/orange toy:
http://scene7.targetimg1.com/is/image/Target/17279476?wid=480&hei=480
I don’t see why that’s necessarily the case. Reentry is mostly about heat, not physical durability. The shuttle’s bottom tiles are, for example, extremely brittle. Shuttle Tiles | Air & Space Magazine| Smithsonian Magazine
More likely, it’s just space magic (e.g., shields, ignoring reentry heat), rather than a natural and necessary consequence of being able to enter atmosphere.
Lack of damage seems more like a consequence of budget and/or not being worth the effort.
Lack of damage seems more like a consequence of budget and/or not being worth the effort.
Reentry the way we do it is mainly heat dissipation, because we can’t build things durable enough to stand up to more direct reentries, or at least can’t build them lightly enough to make them sensible choices for putting into space. (Also deceleration, but we can assume inertial compensation for this.) If you’re building in the Star Wars universe, you have the materials science to build a ship out of stuff that can take a deceleration of 100g at five thousand Kelvin, and the engines to lift without worrying about the weight.
The observation was that the ships seem tough to the point of silliness. You’ve just built yourself a giant chain of speculation to rationalize it, as if it were some sort of common sense, scientific inevitability. Moreover, you implied that the result must have been the product of some sort of reasoned out thought. There’s zero basis for that, when the much more likely scenario is a) they didn’t think about it or b) they didn’t bother to address it, even if they did think about. Either of those are fine, it’s a relatively small detail.
Ship construction in Star Wars is like hyperspace navigation. There’s no real science or even logic to it. Ships are as durable as the script needs them to be for that moment. A ship can clang against another body with no problems one minute, then arbitrarily start venting poisonous gases into the crew compartment due to a faulty coupling somewhere.
It’s not an inevitability, and it isn’t likely something they thought about, but that doesn’t mean it can’t make sense. Outside of combat, Star Wars ships have always felt tough to the point of silliness. Luke crashes a snowspeeder into the ground and an X-wing into a swamp, and although one of them isn’t usable anymore, neither of them are externally very much worse for the wear.
Kind of an odd observation you make about obsessing over small details the creators of a work didn’t give a second thought. Is that supposed to be a bad thing? That’s a great definition of fandom.
I don’t know. It’s a pretty common sci fi that star ships are made of super resilient armor, or has special shields to make up for it. I don’t believe that’s much of a stretch. How else do you explain flying through the debris field of a destroyed Death Star and surviving? Or actually, any space encounters?
Now, the fact that you can hear laser fire in space, now that is annoying.