If it’s also in the service of the story, that’s fine. What bugs me in this case is that they had to throw out the following in order to include the old actors:
• All the EU content. I have never read an EU book, but I know a lot of the basic plotlines from reading Wookiepedia. Even if their execution wasn’t great in the actual books, some of the stories sound cool.
• The further adventures of Luke after RotJ (whether it were to follow the EU or not).
• The ability to film at any other point in time other than one that reflects the current ages of the old actors.
To me, that’s a lot to pay for this particular instance of fanservice. Really, the entire movie has been built around their inclusion, and it ends up destroying the legacy of those characters:
• Luke is a failed hermit (he wasn’t a failure in the EU).
• Han is basically a failure too (divorced and back to his smuggler ways, with no character evolution–he wasn’t a failure in the EU).
• Leia is kindof a nothing now, also divorced (she plays a bigger role in the EU).
So it’s not just whether the EU was great art or not–at least it was positive about these main characters and their accomplishments. I find the starting point of TFA just absolutely depressing and negating of what came before it.
Actually, one of my favorite things about the movie, and part of why I’m not convinced it’s merely a retread of earlier movies, is how the generational thing plays out.
The first trilogy was basically about a bunch of teenagers and early-twenty-somethingers saving the galaxy. There were two good older dudes–Kenobi and Yoda–both of whom existed only to advise a teenage wizard on how to be magic, before dying. The other old dudes were bad guys, and the teenagers had to defeat the old dudes in order to clear up the galaxy for themselves.
The new movie changed all that. Sure, the folks at the heart of the movie are still teenagers. But now the older generation is playing more important roles: Leia, Han, Chewie are all central to the action. Yoda’s role is split between Gramma Maz and Luke, it looks like, but Luke’s role may become more important in the next movie. The “son must kill the father” schtick was more or less a great thing in the first movie, whereas in this one the trope was inverted, with the act of patricide becoming the clearest symbol of the bad guy’s badguyness.
So whatever other problems I have with Abrams (great action, incoherent plots), I think his use of the older actors was pretty great.
Interesting. I haven’t read the art book, I could have sworn I heard something about the Senate mentioned in the movie. Possible I picked it up from discussions elsewhere, though.
Still, even if that’s not currently “official,” I think we can safely conclude that at this point
The First Order and Republic are At War
Whatever response the Republic makes is probably not something that would be effective within the timeframe of the Resistance base getting blown up.
For that matter, do we even have canon-sourced ideas of how full-scale galactic conflict would work? We know that the Death Star 2’s shields were enough to stop a fleet attack, as were the Hoth shields. And both of those were small installations vulnerable to ground landings outside of the shielded radius. For all I know, a fully defended/shielded planet is impervious to everything short of a Death Star-level weapon, meaning that planetary warfare would be more of a protracted siege.
Throwing out the EU had nothing to do with shoe horning in the old actors. It was done because Disney wanted a clean slate to start building their own EU. If every actor from the original series had refused to appear in the new movie, they’d have still thrown out the EU.
And, to be clear, by “thrown out,” I mean, “Will continue to publish into perpetuity, so long as someone’s buying.” The only practical difference between the old EU, and the newly de-canonized EU, is that they’re publishing the same books with, “Legacy” printed on the covers. Because Disney owns the IPs to those works, they’re free to pick and choose whatever elements they want to include in their new EU. Most of the cool stuff from the EU is almost certain to show up again in the new universe.
They can still do post-RotJ Luke stories. There’s thirty years between the end of Jedi and the start of the new film, and Luke hasn’t been in hiding for all of them. At most, he’s been gone for maybe five years.’
Currently, I don’t think Disney is doing any stories set in the post-Jedi setting that feature Luke. But they will. I think that’s pretty much guaranteed.
There’s already a “Young Han Solo” film in pre-production.
It’s hard to say what is canon anymore, but it appears that Empire Strikes Back is standard operating procedure for planetary invasions - send ground forces down because they can go under/through the shields, have the ground forces take the shields down, bombard the enemy from orbit until they surrender. The invasion of Naboo in TPM seems to follow this strategy (on both a planetary and battlefield scale) and it’s used as a plot device several times in the Clone Wars cartoons.
In a proper planetary defense, you couldn’t land troops until you’d fought a space battle with defensive star ships, and we do get some glimpses of that as well.
There could never have been a Star Wars VII without the original cast as long as the actors (and their characters) were still alive. The fans would not have stood for it; many are already outraged that Billy Dee Williams hasn’t returned.
I’d call Luke a pretty damn successful hermit, as it was a pain in the ass to find him. As for Han Solo, “failure” is debatable, but it’s logical to believe he would have turned out exactly as he did in the new movie (I’m not familiar with the EU at all.) In fact, one of the bright spots in this dismal movie was seeing how much fun Harrison Ford seemed to be having.
Including the actors necessitated throwing out the EU, and there was no way they weren’t going to include them (I agree with buddha-david).
This is probably true. Not that I would agree with that decision.
If they get that far. I think they’re planning to do too much, and it’s going to be awful and people will get mighty sick of it all. The same thing’s going to happen to the “Marvel Cinematic Universe” (what a self-important name!). They are both going to kill the golden goose by stuffing it so full of “value-added content” that it explodes.
It’s not logical, because he already didn’t turn out that way–in the OT. He had a character arc in which he went from a selfish smuggler to a person who was willing to do all for his friends and his cause.
Han Solo’s reversion to selfish smuggler makes all the sense in the world. Their kid turned into Darth friggin’ Vader.
Real-life relationships have imploded over much less.
It’s also made clear that Han didn’t leave all at once. He says to Leia that the reason he used to leave so often was so that she’d miss him. Probably he started with small trips here and there, and they gradually grew longer and longer until one day he didn’t come back at all. But it’s not like he just up and left one day.
For me, it didn’t make any sense: Leia and Han’s reactions to their son’s turn towards the Dark Side was unbelievably muted, to the point of apathy:
Han: I was so distressed by our son’s decision to become monstrously evil that I have spent the last (10?) years buggering about the galaxy with my old pal just I like I used to when I was an awesome space pirate.
Leia: I too am very upset by the tragic and horrific turn our lives have taken, and have coped with it by doing much the same stuff I was doing before.
Han: I am glad that you too appear to have done sweet bugger all about trying to fix a problem that we as this tortured young man’s parents must feel some responsibility for.
Leia: That’s totally unfair! I only recently found a potential clue to the whereabouts of my brother and in the hope of dumping the entire problem on him, sent just one guy to pick it up. I could have sent larger force, possibly one with the ability to transmit coded information, but I was just too distraught I suppose.
Han: That’s certainly more than anyone could have expected, all things considered. But at least you haven’t spent the last decade or so trying desperately to reestablish contact with your errant son.
Leia: I should cocoa!
Back to the OP, I didn’t see any reason to think that the Starkiller Base was on a completely hollowed-out planet. A possibly-gratuitous amount of underground bunkers and structures, but a fair amount of above-ground structures too, and I believe the command bunker, main weapon, and weak-link-technostructure-to-be-blown-up were all pretty close to each other. And there was still plenty of trees, etc. So it seems quite possible that the Base was a city’s worth of excavation, but that’s orders of magnitude easier than hollowing out a moon or building a Death Star.
That’s a lot of filling in the blanks. Normal crazeball religious cults often encourage new recruits to cut off all contact with their families, the better to indoctrinate the chumps. That’s how crazeball religious cults work when they lack magic powers, massive military forces, and interstellar drives. It’s fairly likely that the First Order would be even more extreme in insulating their top new recruit from parents who are galactic legends at defeating members of their cult.
I’m not sure what you’re even talking about, here. You’ve been complaining that they threw out all the EU stuff, and when I point out that they’re making new EU stuff, you say that’s a mistake that’s going to kill off the franchise. Which is it?
Not sure if you’re being sarcastic or not, here, as you’ve indicated both that you want to see new actors in these roles, and that you don’t want to see these characters having more adventures.
There’s a belt of excavation around the front half of the planet that looks maybe 1,000 miles deep if this is all Earth-scale*. Certainly deep enough to go well past the crust into magma, which means some kind of fantastical engineering to support the walls of that excavation. With that level of excavation and fantastical supports, it might be easier to have built the darn thing from scratch.
Of course, the rebellion’s holographic images show it next to a Death Star, which makes it clear that it’s actually quite a bit smaller than Earth… That makes excavation easier, but it would also mean requiring artificial gravity and artificial atmosphere to explain other things we see (like trees).
“…just because you can, in your mind, connect the dots between RotJ and TFA doesn’t justify the necessity of extrapolating that connection, nor does it make the TFA’s story any damn good.”
Han was a hero at the end of RotJ. So was Leia. They were successes, they were in love, and I wanted to believe in their future. I don’t want to see them as failures with a failed marriage.
“Just because it makes sense to you doesn’t mean it makes sense.”
Sorry, but I’m not “extrapolating a connection.” I watched the movie. In the theater, in that moment, when Han and Leia reunited, I understood. I felt a little sad for their lost love, but I understood the circumstances around it. There was no need to sit there and draw some kind of tortured line of justification between the movies. Two kids fell in love and got married. They had a son. Terrible, tragic events happened. Two lovers grew, growing older amid tragedy, drifted apart.
Seriously? In what galaxy, near or far, is this an unrealistic line of extrapolation?
Did we want to see them with a failed marriage? No, of course not. We don’t want anything bad to happen to good guys. Except that we also do want bad things to happen to good guys because otherwise there would be no conflicts.
Or, because it’s still rather new, it could be they’re not using all the space in it yet. How much time have they had to collect prisoners? Maybe they only need a few detention blocks up and running and the rest are still closed.
I love that thought. Until a movie says otherwise, this is what I’m going to believe.
I always got the feeling that they were trying to coordinate too many systems, with too many different societies, so that both the Empire and the Republic were ungainly, inefficient, and subject to gaming. Winning a military victory is not the same thing as building a stable government. The second is many orders of magnitude more difficult.
I’m not at all disappointed that the heroes of the rebellion were capable of doing the first but are still working on the second.
As for Han Solo, “failure” is debatable, but it’s logical to believe he would have turned out exactly as he did in the new movie (I’m not familiar with the EU at all.) In fact, one of the bright spots in this dismal movie was seeing how much fun Harrison Ford seemed to be having.