Good choice, though I was not that huge a fan. Having said that, it was very, very good.
I haven’t seen much, if any, speculation considering Leia’s role in the new movie. From what I’ve read she is now a general of sorts. What I’m interested in finding out is if she went to Luke after Return of the Jedi and said, “Hey bro, I’m totally down with learning this Force thing. Can you help me out with that?”
I take back “completely ordinary”.
I’m now going with “a stunning, spectacular success, both artistically and box-office wise”.
(Since everybody else is betting negative, I’ll take the counter bet.)
I think it will be mildly disappointing because it will be a set-up movie. It will introduce new characters, have some action scenes, pull you into the story, and before it reaches any conclusion… TO BE CONTINUED… And leave everyone waiting another 2 years to find out what happens next.
I fear instead of telling a good story, beginning-middle-end, like the original Star Wars we’re going to get a “Chapter 1” movie.
I don’t know, I think it will have a end of sorts, but Kylo Ren will escape, like Vader did in the first one.
Star Wars has a good track record of wrapping things up well enough. There’s some setup for future movies, but there is still a satisfying resolution of a particular conflict. This is largely true even in offshoots like the modern cartoons. Each episode may advance an over-arching storyline, but it’s not like Game of Thrones, where an episode ends because an hour has gone by, not because anything in particular has been resolved.
And JJ Abrams is good at setting up mysteries and making good pilots. Less good at following through. Probably good someone else is directing Episodes VIII and IX.
Too bad Jurassic World’s director is directing IX. I hate, hate, hated Jurassic World.
I’m encouraged that Lawrence Kasdan is one of the writers (along with JJ Abrams. He wrote or co-wrote The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi and Raiders of the Lost Ark.
On a side note, although the new Star Wars film will open in Thailand this week like everywhere else in the world, when the first one was released back in 1977 it took four years to get it to the screen over here. The cinema situation has vastly improved in recent years.
Excerpt: “George Lucas’s Star Wars was released in the US in May 1977 and became a phenomenon. But that year the Thai government, in a bid to protect the local film industry from foreign products, hiked up the import tax on 35mm film (film existed in rolls then, not the digital hard disk of today). The tax increase was outrageous – from 2.2 baht per metre to 30 baht per metre, or a 1,300% surge. As a consequence, from 1977 to the early 1980s Hollywood studios boycotted the exorbitant duty and no American films made it to Thai cinemas. The first episode of Star Wars was one of the casualties.”
Was the Hollywood premier tonight? What time do they start the actual movie and when do they end? Shouldn’t there be some celebrity reaction tweets by now?
Yes, the premier was last night, and there have been tweets.
https://twitter.com/hashtag/StarWarsForceAwakens?src=hash
Brian
Patton Oswalt said it was awesome. I trust him quite a bit. Seth Green agreed, as did Rainn Wilson.
I trust their view up to a point. I have no idea what they would have tweeted after one viewing of Phantom Menace. Many, including me, thought Menace was good after one theatrical viewing.
Patton also tweeted that huge shocks are in the movie, so spoilers may be prevalent by Friday. Duck and cover, folks!
Expectations for this are crazy high. I saw an article today about last night’s premiere that the ticket sales are expected to be about $2.5 billion worldwide and merchandise sales over the next year about five billion. And I just checked the weekend schedule at my local twenty-screen multiplex. They’re only showing this and the Tina Fey/Amy Poehler comedy Sisters on Friday through Sunday (except for two showings on Sunday of Miracle on 34th Street).
Understandable. It’s like those first few seconds right after you take a shotgun blast to the gut, when you’re dabbing at the wound with a napkin and telling yourself it isn’t that bad.
I’m rather hoping that the phrase “Now that’s more like it” will appear in reviews.
Exactly my thoughts. He did Ratatouille with Disney/Pixar/Marvel/Lucasfilm, but has geek cred.
Okay, so if it pulls an Avengers within the context of the Star Wars Universe, yeah, I could see it crushing Avatar.
I think the podrace is a great scene for kids to watch and while I was 21, it pulled me in a lot, almost enough to make the movie bearable. The problem is that if you watch that podrace more than a couple times, it becomes a complete drag. I showed just the pod race to my son the other day(he’s 5) and while he liked it, I was surprised how forgetable it really looks now. The chase through the woods in Return of the Jedi looks better and has aged well enough that I look forward to it even today. They did way more with less.
The gungan vs. robot battle seemed kind of neat when I saw the movie the first time, but it is mindless and devolved into a Jar-Jar goof fest.
The space stuff with little Anakin is dreadful, but I remember thinking it was adequate at first glance.
The early reviews are available today. Rotten Tomatoes has the movie at 97%; 107 good reviews vs 3 bad ones.
The NYTimes said it was good. That’s a pretty big deal! They said JJ Abrams returned to focus on characters over scale and whiz-bang. Hope so!!