It does explain why he was paid so much though 
1 Like
Wheres the trash compacter?
I liked it, and it felt really short, at least to me, even though it was 2 and a half hours. I thinkā¦
You forgot one in the dislikes listā¦
Another catwalk with gaps between the rails, conveniently placed over a bottomless pit.
1 Like
Rails are for pansies!!! 
The First Order is not concerned with your personal safety 
1 Like
Now that Iāve seen it a few times.
Yes it did feel a little bit like episode 4, but obviously he was going for that. Reminds me of Bio-shock Infiniteā¦thereās always a planet killer and a complicated father-son relationship.
I canāt help but wonder why thereās only one star destroyer in the entire galaxy. If you can scrounge up the resources to turn an entire planet into a giant star-eating hyperspace laser, then surely you can build a shipyard and some more fricken star destroyers. Same goes for the resistanceā¦what was that, 10 or so fighters? Both sides need to fire their logistics planners.
Good movie overallā¦still well done no matter what your gripes are.
1 Like
Iāve just seen it. The screen was not wide enough so the film had black bars top and bottom, and there was too much blue light spilling off the LED strip lights this cinema had on the steps next to the seats. Made the blacks on the screen look washed out/blue. I complained big time.
This spoilt it completely for me.
I didnāt also like the film much to be honest. It was not long enough and moved along too fast for my liking.
When I got home I watched the first 4 episodes of āThe Expanseā which I enjoyed far more. Thatās my kind of sci-fi.
I might go to my usual cinema and see it again if its not on a tiny screen. But also think waiting for the extended DC bluray might be also worth itā¦if there is one.
The Imperial March is also Vaderās Theme, so it doesnāt really belong in this trilogy (except perhaps when Kylo is seen talking to his grandfatherās mask.
Some observations, now that Iāve finally seen the bloody film:
- Kylo Ren is a disappointing villain, who is angsty throughout. Itās also worth noticing he was asking Anakinās mask for advice on sticking on the ādark pathā, which is odd given that Anakinās final action was to return to the light to save his son.
- Rey discovers her Force powers too late in the film to see them develop much, which might just be saving up for the next two filmsā¦
- Hanās ādeathā was avoidable, and didnāt do much for Renās plot development. This is partly because Ren talks so bloody little. If Ren is to turn back to the light later on, it might be that Hanās death isnāt permanent, somehow.
- A lot of the setting establishing is rushed through, which makes it hard to understand where everything is in relation to each other. Additionally, none of the places visited in any of the other Star Wars films made it into this film, even though Jakku is a dead ringer for Tatooine
- Additionally to the above, the encounter with Han Solo is confusing, because it looks like the Falcon is being taken onto the First Order Star Destroyer. The throwaway encounter with two seperate parties of goons just makes it more confusing.
- The First Order officers look too young and fresh-faced, and the Stormtroopers armour is glossy (though agreeably comes with a variety of combat modifications for ammo and the like). The Empireās commanders were all middle-aged straight-faced veterans, though given Renās childish outbursts Iām not surprised. This combination completely fails to mimic the menacing air that TESB captures so well. As for the Stormtrooper armour, in the Empire it was fairly matte, so didnāt appear quite so glossy. Itās not much of an issue, itās just not pleasing to the eyes.
Thatās a fair few negatives, so Iāll round up with some positives.
- The introduction of the Millenium Falcon was good, intentionally channelling ANH with Rey initially making disparaging comments about it before being forced to use it. Though goodness knows why Finn went for the ventral turret when theyāre being chased by TIE fighters
- The tethered TIE fighter scene was amusing, even if itās painful to see how much old SW knowledge is being trampled on. Obviously every SW fan knows that TIE fighters donāt have landing gears (and are single-seater), so it should have been mounted in an overhead docking bay, but alas, clearly itās some new model.
This Snoke character is a bit of a mystery (the Darth Plagueis angle is interesting, but if Disney carries on with itās lore-stomping trajectory, thatās unlikely), but I feel his role will play out alongside Renās character progression through the next two films. The real mystery so far however is the involvement the New Republic has at all, considering the only time you really see the Republic is when the planet gets destroyed. But the overall impact of any of this filmās events is entirely unclear.
I felt on itās individual merits it was a fun film that I enjoyed watching and would probably watch again. As to itās place in the Star Wars universe, itās clear itās part of a trilogy, and is fairly inconsequential by itself (except for Han Soloās death, of course)
Iām going to out myself as someone who has read a lot of books from the old extended universe. There it was considered canon that TIEs actually could land on their panels (structurally) but that it was just not the intended way to use them. I donāt think it is a huge stretch that they changed that for newer versions (much like the X-Wings have been updated too).
I was thinking more on the basis of there being two seats rather than the landing on panels. I was fine with that but just a little confused about the extra seat. Also, a tether seems like a strange thing to use to ground a TIE fighter
1 Like
Maybe a fuel line? 
1 Like
Well, maybe. Itās unexplained though, like a lot in this movie, which is frustrating.
Thatās what I assumed.
Itās to take there moms to the store. Canāt be just a plot hole for some bad writing. That would be dumb. ā¦ 0.o
Finally seen it a few days ago (shortly after the Originals again). I both liked it and felt very frustrated.
There is a great Star Wars film here, hidden under a poor Star Wars film masquerading as a good low-brow Space Fantasy flick.
Also, like most films, an awful waste of 3D. Iāve seen good 3D films in theatre. Gravity and Gozilla were passable - 3D was a small but neat plus - everything else I saw was only disappointing. When youāve seen, in your childhood, a full panoramic of the Andes as the character discovers exactly where he crashed, but with actual depth of field instead of a 50m box, youāre 3D-spoiled.)
The good flick:
- Visually great. If there is one thing JJ knows how to do, itās making great( if glossy)-looking films. Similarly, the performances all around were pretty good.
- Entertaining. Well-paced, with good action scenes and an easily followable plot.
- No āThis is just dumb!ā, āYou are so dumb!ā or āI just donāt care!ā moment.
- No āLetās shun that Lying Liar who Liedā that is way too common here. Sure, he lied. Not very well, in fact. And that was understandable. So they guessed it already and simply wait for him to be ready to admit it. Like actually nice persons. Characters not being jerks about it! So refreshing!
Not a masterpiece by any means, but two pretty good hours if you donāt let your brain act up too much. Definitely fun to watch!
The bad Star Wars film dastardly wearing its disguise
- Instead of going for its own, singular thing, it is copying the original. Death Star coldly blowing a planet up? Check. Sand planet? Check. Masked, deep-voiced villain that was formed by the good guys? Check. High-ranking officer of Evil as the second villain? Check. Trench run? Check. About one of the many Star Destroyers ever visible? Check. C3PO and R2D2? Check. And so onā¦
- So a stormtrooper, conditioned from infancy up, suddenly grows a conscience at his first front assignment? Ok, seriously, how often do your crappy conditioning produce deserters like that? You should have entire contingency plans for that by now!
- The only reason those light, fast, fragile, disposable TIE cannon-fodders we know and loved are now two-seaters is because the plot needed it. Two-seater TIE fighters, it simply doesnāt add up.
- Then again, a single cannon-fodder TIE can disable the defences of an entire Star Destroyer and live to tell the tale, so maybe we donāt want to see a handful of Republic cruisers wiping the entire First Order fleet out by mistaking them for troop transports.
- Ok Republic, you know those guys love their planet killers. Where are your effing counter-measures? You know, those so, so common planetary shields, for example? No? You do know that Darwin Awards explicitly ask for you to only excise your defective genes from the poolā¦
- While weāre at it, no Republican capital ship ever thought about, you know, hyperjump when they saw the big light coming? I guess we couldnāt inflict awesome capship-vs-capship massive battle scenes to those poor viewers, thatās not what they want to see in a Star Wars film!
- Also, some more development of the Republic than a few silent seconds of random people would have been nice. Right now, it simply feels like a contrived āLook, people died! Feel sad!ā. All we know about them is that they finance the Resistance and that they are literally too dumb to live.
- Hollywood inflation: after āthatās no moon?ā āthatās no planetā, of course! Because who wants original designs, like, I donāt know, successive rings near the star surface, or maybe a Dyson Swarm eating the star, or maybe two polar stations opening the star in half, or maybe anything but a bland, cartoony cannon-stuck-in-a-planet designā¦
- How did you make the Star Wars OST sound bland? Even the prequels didnāt manage that.
The biggest problem is that JJ apparently canāt do storytelling if his life depended on it. Exposition is clumsy, character development rushed to terminal velocity, plot threads big enough to change local climate, plot holes as big and avoidable as the Meteor Crater, and a terrible habit to ape episode IV.
The great Star Wars film hidden in the shadows
- Old stories with a new spin. The amoral character growing a conscience, and risking everything for his friends? The smugglerās been done enough. What about a young soldier in the evil army? The young Hero-to-be with a miserable existence on a (sandy) remote planet, getting caught in the war? Sure, but a lone, self-reliant scavenger, and one who does not want adventures or even the Force. Said Hero rescuing the (badass on her own right) Princess in Distress from the Evil Army? Wouldnāt it be funny if it was actually the same character rescuing herself? And so onā¦
- Stormtroopers can actually shoot straight, and are pretty good at riot control btw. (Still wondering what those armours are for - probably still civilian contractor companies doing sloppy-to-useless work because of their ties to power) Well, everyone can shoot straight. Remember those poor Rebels in the original? They were even worse shots than the Stormtroopers! (Unless the armour did actually deflect grazing hits?)
- The First Order? They look like a new, aggressive faction inside the Empire. The old Empire was Nazis as full-swing Third Reich with its experienced Whermacht, this is the rising Nazis that just took power in the ruins of the Weimar Republic, remembering the Great Old Days of the previous Empire. It is no surprise they are all so young: this is a younger movement, where the Old Guard was probably more in favour of conservative tactics, maybe even truce and diplomacy with the Republic.
- Also the Resistance? The First Orderās argument, unfortunately, holds water here: the Republic is financing them to destabilize it from the inside. This may very well be what gave them the support they needed in the Empireās ranks.
- However badly told, those characters are actually pretty interesting. Two in particular are an interesting twist in a Star Wars movie :
- Finn. He is nothing, and he knows it. Just a number, another piece of meat for the Machine. But when confronted to the choice, instead of taking the easy way, he will sacrifice literally everything to do whatās right. Then he knows he is in way too much trouble, and just wants out. But again, when his friend is targeted, he chooses to go back in harmās way for her sake, instead of, again, the easy way out. This is not the Hero answering to the Call, or even the Hero resisting the lures of Evil, but the ordinary guy doing the right thing, overcoming his flaws and despite the terrible cost.
This makes him IMHO the best character among the good guys in the entire series. How heroic is he actually? He will engage a trained Jedi in a lightsabre duel. - Ren. The flawed, struggling apprentice makes for an interesting main antagonist. Why does he wears a mask? Because his role model wore one. He is unable to control his emotions and will wreck equipment - well of course, the Dark side is about letting your emotions controlling you - however, note that he isnāt actually killing his men just to vent anger. Iād be surprised if the one force choke he did was actually lethal after the cut.
- A supraluminic superweapon. Of course that was what the Empire would develop next. I would have expected it to take the form of a giant projectile cannon (Iāve heard about something like that in the now-retconned EU), but this a logical next move.
- Did you note how scales were off? One can see planets (albeit as specks of light) from a system away. Stars arenāt that big compared to planets, nor very far away (their suns probably have a bigger angular size than ours, on their habitable planets, unless their spacetime is very non-flat). Light is also faster - you can see events from a system away almost instantly. Add to that what weāve seen in the originals: you can go to nearby systems even without hyperspace, vacuum has positive pressure and friction, asteroid fields are thick, planets blow up at the slightest crust damage (or the Death Star would have simply punched a hole in the surface and instant-killed everyone on it, not turn it in a dense - and already cold - asteroid field).
This film is Star Wars actually embracing that their universe follow its own rules and has its own scales, which makes it way more coherent. - Finn again. Having a non-Force user (either non-awakened or insensitive) getting actually cornered to wield a lightsabre, and being pretty decent with it, while still being credible. Interesting move there.
This script actually has a great core. If it is ever remade by a competent storyteller, it has the potential to be one of the greatest of the franchise.
Missed opportunities
- You know, when Ray suddenly āgetā the Force in the middle of her lightsabre duel. Some hypothesize that she was Force-trained in her youth and mind-wiped, and this is her training coming back. Sounds reasonable to me (and anyone having played a certain videogame), but there is one door they unfortunately closed.
She clearly voids her mind, calling the Light side. So if she did receive training, it wasnāt Dark side training. Which is unfortunate; she should have used the Dark side instead.
Calling on the Dark side would have been more natural (and more credible), either for a mind-wiped (either way) or a latent Force user. It is easier, faster and more seductive, after all, qualities very appreciated when you are in the middle of a lightsabre duel and under huge emotional stress.
And if she had actually been Dark side-trained, it would have opened many interesting narrative avenues, both if she ultimately overcame it or fell (again, the aforementioned videogame is reference material).
And she has a staff. What kind of lightsabre that would make? Shorten it and put a full-sized lightsabre at each end.
But, some will say, it would be as long as a halberd if not more! That would get struck everywhere in confined spaces! But it would be the lightsabre parts that would get stuck everywhere. Lightsabres donāt get stuck. On the other hand, it would pretty much wreck everything (and everyone) around. Collateral damage would be its second name.
Perfect weapon for a Dark Jedi.
Was that intentional?
So they attack a heavily fortified enemy installation. Remember those Y-wing light bombers? Remember those B-wing attack crafts? Wouldnāt those have been nice, instead of the ordinance- and punch-limited multirole X-wings? Yeah, sounds like someone made a serious blunder when planning force composition for the Resistance fighter wing.
Maybe itās lazy storytelling again - have only the X-wings! Those are all people remember anyway. Maybe itās gross ignorance of the realities of basic strategic planning.
Or maybe they wanted to make a point about the over-reliance on a jack-of-all-trade craft, as effective, manoeuvrable and all-around great (and great-looking) as it is, instead of having at least a few platforms for roles that are too specialised - a discreet attack on a well-known āomniroleā (overtime and overbudget, and possibly a bit fragile) fighter project.
Maybe JJ has a point to make about the Rafale.
The one unforgivable sin
And then, he had to pull an Into Darkness.
Remember in the Star Trek franchise, when they used the interstellar teleporter? Remember how it made the entire concept of starships as they knew pretty much obsolete? Remember how it changed the face of society, war and all-around civilisation all across the Galaxy? No?
Well, maybe the interstellar teleporter can only work once per galactic year, after all. Good thing this guy had one, in Into Darkness, or he would have to use the contrived, incoherent mean of an actual starship to go to that other planet. Who would have believed that?
Remember in the Star Wars franchise, how ships never bother leaving atmosphere, or even their hangar, to hyperjump? Remember all those BSG-style manoeuvres where they enter or exit hyperspace wherever they want, be it in atmosphere, right above the surface of the planet, or even in the middle of the enemy fortress to blast it at point blank range? Remember how no-one relies on planetary shields, as any ship can bypass those? No?
Well, maybe itās because they mounted the Lost Orb of Phanastacoria on the Falconās reactor, which allows it to ignore every limit we ever saw on hyperspace jumps. Good thing, too, otherwise we would have needed an actually smart way of bypassing/deactivating that shield, like, say, a previously stolen ship (this one works well), hijacking or hiding on an enemy ship, concentrating fire with surviving capital ships (oh wait) to open a small hole on the shield so exactly one ship with the size and shields of the Falcon can slip through while facing the entire enemy defence fleet (oh wait again), tricking/bluffing them into letting them pass, having some character being a defector so he heard about passage windows, or any other boring, incoherent, easy way to bypass that shield.
Now the Deus Ex Machina is out of the bottle.
Eff you, Jar Jar Abrams. You earned it.
4 Likes
I think youāve described the movie pretty well, but those two words sum up my reaction - it was a missed opportunity. There were so many powerful themes and scenarios set up, only to be rushed through in moments. Rey pretty much self-trains in the force in about 20 minutes. The legendary Han Solo dies and the other characters shrug a bit and move on. The trip across the galaxy to find Luke was completed in about one minute (oddly followed by over a minute of Ray trekking through the ruins). Shoot, I thought that would be the entire second movie (following the map, not walking through the ruins).
I did like the ending scene, with Rey holding out the light saber, calling Luke to return to the life of a Jedi.
Best line in the movie? āAaand Iāll drop my weapon.ā Daniel Craig playing Stormtrooper JB-007, according to the Web.
In general, the movie very much had the feel of the Lord of the Rings movies, where they had too much material for the time available, and the resulting experience feels terribly rushed. Iād probably love the book version of The Force Awakens.
1 Like
Thereās a lot I could respond to in your post, but this is just a small one I felt like addressing.
I imagine that all Stormtroopers go through some form of basic training and then on-going training until assignment, but until then donāt actually experience real combat or have to kill someone. I donāt believe that sort of āconditioningā and then a subsequent assignment as a janitorial technician (I forget the actual title) would turn him into a cold blooded killer. If he hadnāt run into Poe after Captain Phasma ordered him to get his weapon checked, Iām sure they would have punished him somehow for not following orders (by not firing his weapon).
Honestly, when watching it, even though I knew one of the main characters was a Stormtrooper, I still felt like the raid on Jakku was simply trying to convey their human side and not make Finn seem special. Even the trooper who left the bloodstains on his helmet seemed to project some sense of remorse.
And this is exactly what the film should have shown. So far, Stormtrooper = cold-blooded killer. Getting to see how it really is and how Finn escaped this mindset would have been great.
And humanize stormtroopers? Make the audience feel sorry about them? We canāt have our audience question the morality of killing humans that are essentially either slaves with little choice or brainwashed people with little choice. Otherwise the main characters would be psychopaths, making jokes about killing humans without a second thought. Whatās next, having the main character shooting first?
2 Likes
The irony in strong with this one
2 Likes