Nah, the EU content was likely tossed out because it was an enormous, bloated mess spanning hundreds of different books. It was completely incomprehensible to the average fan, and the whole point of this movie was to let everybody on the planet start fresh as a brand new Star Wars fan.
Who’s this we? We (as in everyone in this thread not you) got to see them. You just read about other people who saw them.
I saw the movie twice, in two packed theaters, and all of those geezers got delighted applause when they appeared on screen.
You mean other than the 5 planets that were completely destroyed in front of millions of witnesses? That happens midway through the movie. I think it’s completely fine that that’s the first anyone’s ever heard of this superweapon – implausible, perhaps, given the scope of the thing (another reason for making it smaller and more ramshackle like I suggested earlier), but if the Republic and the First Order are somewhat equal in power as others are suggesting, then why would the Republic not stop the pretense of arming a rebellion and send their own massive fleet of ships to take this planet killer down?
The Star Wars universe has never been exactly clear how FTL communication works, or how long it takes to span typical distances via hyperspace, but the size of the force that goes up against the Starkiller Base is puny even compared to the Rebel Alliance fleet that appeared over Endor in ROTJ. If the Republic is more powerful than the Rebel Alliance at the end of ROTJ, which is (I think) what we all assumed, then what the hell are they doing? That’s my problem with all of this. Actually, this:
Is my real problem with all of this. You’re absolutely right dracoi, there’s no way to spin the politics here except to completely invalidate the events of ROTJ. They simply didn’t matter in any significant way. The Jedi did not return, the Empire was not destroyed. It was a blip, significant to galactic history only because of the size of the weapon that happened to be destroyed, but not at all because of the impact of those events. The prequels did enough of a job lessening the impact of the OT, we don’t need these new movies to do the same.
Circling back to the rest of this post –
We’re made to think of this as a military coup, which is cool, but that doesn’t mean that the infrastructure of the old Republic is *completely *gone. If planets are bowing to the empire out of fear, then it stands to reason that once the fear is gone, they’ll stop bowing. Presumably they have local governments; all it would take would be to kill the Empire-installed governor and go back to business as usual. This is getting into the weeds a bit, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to assume that the Empire in ESB/ROTJ is not as powerful as Empire in ANH, and the movie doesn’t do anything to contradict that (other than messing up the lives of our heroes).
Anyway, this is all what the opening crawl is supposed to be for. “Civil War! The New Republic and the First Order are now equally powerful, and Hyperspace doesn’t work as fast as you sometimes think it does!”
Unfortunately, I keep running into this attitude in regards to this movie. The answer to any legitimate question that would completely break the logic of the movie is, “Well, I can ignore that major problem and/or make something up in my head.” No movie can, or should, try to nail down every possible plothole, missing information, or incongruity. But if you end up having to explain key facts outside of the film, it’s time to step back and reassess the script, trim what’s unnecessary, and go from there. The Force Awakens ended up with wide range of plot threads that were unnecessary, and raise all kinds of questions they couldn’t answer, assuming there were answers in the first place.
I took the beginning scroll to mean that at the end of ROTJ the Empire broke apart, with some remnants eventually rising up again. My feeling was that it was neither a small fraction of its old power nor nearly as powerful: it seems like it was measurably weaker than the Empire but still on the same order of magnitude (i.e. less than half as powerful but more than 1/10th.)
And failing to capitalize on the Empire’s breakup as much as possible does not mean that the events in ROTJ were not important. If would be like arguing that the events of World War 1 didn’t matter because Germany eventually rose again to fight in World War 2, which isn’t entirely untrue, but:
– It was important at the time: it averted the fall of France and caused the breakup of 4 empires.
– Also, just because we failed to capitalize on the postwar peace and failed to prevent the rise of the Third Reich does not mean that World War 1 was hollow and undramatic.
That should have been the moment I knew he was going to die.
Ever see the opening of the original Thunderbirds Are Go movie? There was like 15 minutes of spaceships taxiing on the runway. The new show is more short-attention-span oriented, but back in the day instead of giving the impression that people were spanning vast distances in improbably short time, the old Thunderbirds worked to give the impression that it took fucking hours to get anything done.
It’s not a given that the Republic has a “massive fleet”. The Old Republic didn’t have a standing military - you’ll recall that in Episode II it takes an act of the Senate to establish an Army of the Republic to fight the Separatists, and one of the first things that’s been established in the new EU is that Chancellor Mon Mothma demilitarized the Republic shortly after the Battle of Jakku.
Even if they do have a large fleet, it looks like less than a few days pass between the destruction of the Hosnian system and the second attempted firing, which isn’t much time to rally and deploy the fleet. And it’s likely that Starkiller Base is entrenched deep within First Order territory, meaning they’d have to fight their way through several heavily-defended systems while hyperspace-jumping their way to wherever it is.
True, it’s not a given, but TFA exists in a galaxy where the First Order has a massive fleet of Star Destroyer-like ships, TIE fighters, and an army of child soldiers/storm troopers. Are you suggesting that, in this environment, the Republic has no defenses? No army of their own? That they just returned to the peaceful ways of the Old Republic and decided to hope for the best?
If that’s the case, then one wonders why the First Order needed the Starkiller at all. Seems like they just could have rolled up with a board with a nail in it and declared themselves to be in charge ago.
“The fleet from the Republic won’t get here in time, we have to act now!”
It’s not a very satisfying answer, though. Clearly the writers just wanted to recreate the original trilogy; they wanted an Empire, they wanted Star Destroyers, storm troopers, Darth Vader, and a Death Star. They also wanted a plucky group of rebels flying X-Wings. They worked backwards from there, not really worried if it made a whole lot of sense how they got there.
If the New Republic is structured the same way the old one was, then it’s principally made up of quasi-autonomous kingdoms, principalities, duchies, republics, etc. It’s likely that most of these maintain standing fleets of their own, especially the “border” nations, and that they receive some sort of funding from the Republic government as compensation for providing for the common defense. That was the basis of the Separatist army - the sovereign militaries of the thousands of systems that had broken away from the Republic, augmented by the droid armies of the Trade Federation (and we can probably assume that there are still megacorps with private armies of their own, as well).
I have a feeling that eventually fans will not need to connect the dots. Disney’s probably planning to make an infinite number of Star Wars movies. The Force Awakens was the first step on that path. I assumed the gaps between it and Return of the Jedi were purposeful so that Disney can go back and fill them in with other movies. It is likely that some day you will have your movie about the adventures of Luke Skywalker and friends immediately after Return of the Jedi.
And that’s also why they are ignoring the EU. It’s not like they’re going to make five or six movies and say, “That’s enough money for us. We’re going to give up on this Star Wars stuff.” They want to cover the time frame dealt with in the EU and not have to make movies about force sensitive rabbits.
TFA was a palate cleanser. A little something to take the taste of the prequels out of everyone’s mouth. That’s why it tasted so familiar - just “mixture as before”.
I’ll second this. Throwing out the EU is the best thing that could have happened for Episodes 7-9. (It’s also the best thing that ever happened to my book shelves). The EU makes the prequels look good.
And I know everyone who likes the EU points to Thrawn as the exception, but really? Sherlock Holmes on a Star Destroyer is the crowning jewel of the EU? :smack:
I absolutely agree that this is one area that they could have done a better job explaining, but as I recall those planets that got destroyed were the ones that the Republic Senate was convening on at the time.
So this first strike was the equivalent of a Pearl Harbor attack, if the carriers were still in port, and they used a nuke, and they did it when the President and Congress were there for a visit. Yeah, you’re at war now, good luck with your fast response!
But honestly, a lot of the nitpicking about political details seems as silly as criticizing Bond films because they don’t fully explore the actual impacts of having seemingly dozens of massive evil organizations on Cold War politics.
I totally missed this implication. Doesn’t mean it wasn’t there, just that it slipped by me if it was.
Bingo. Personally, I don’t think it invalidates the ending of RotJ at all. After all, they mentioned that Luke tried to start a new Jedi order and Solo’s kid put an end to that rather violently. And the Resistance defeated the Empire when Palpatine when down, but enterprising warlords constructed the First Order in it’s place before the Republic could fully establish itself. At least, that’s my shortest distance between the two points.
As for the EU, I grew bored and stopped reading rather early on. Some were good, some were serviceable, most weren’t worth reading. Better to drop them altogether rather than assume the audience read (and remembers) specific books, events and characters.
By the way…this “version” of the Death Star was much more succesful than the last two. At least they blew away the Republic Fleet and several important planets. AND they still have their fleet, main general,and Supreme Leader. Yes…they also still have Angry Force Boy…but you take the good with the bad.
Yes, it’s Power of the Force: 3, Technological Terrors: Nil…but Technological Terrors made a good showing this time!
It’s not in the movie. It’s in a companion art book. Which I hadn’t even heard of, but happened to noticed this tidbit listed with the source on a wiki of all things.
