Star Wars Episode VII ANTI-anticipation thread

Cafe Society
1

Bits and pieces of this movie are coming to us in the form of trailers, posters, toys, and more. Yeah, I was in Costco today, and already… MERCHANDISE!!! And that droid toy at Brookstone. Cool toy! That’s about as nice as Ima get here…

Sorry, this movie is going to blow dead bears. Here’s why:

• Kylo Ren is Darth Vader in a slightly different suit. Gotta have a bad guy! He’s gotta be a badass! Well, with the black robe and that mask, he looks like… Vader, yeah. How is a Vader retread going to be interesting at all?

• For that matter, any villains after Vader and Palpatine are anticlimactic. These dudes is defined, at least within the Unextended Universe, as the baddest-ass Dark Side users of all time. Palpatine is defeated, but… another dude emerges… and he’s a total badass! And he’s got this wicked new lightsaber, dude! Yawn.

• The rolly-polly droid makes for a nice toy, but is that a good design? Totally not. Is having a metal ball roll along abrasive sand and rocks in any way a good idea? IRL, it would be destroyed in a matter of hours, scratched and dented to oblivion. Legs, people, legs. Or like hover or something.

• I don’t want to see fat old Han, Luke, and Leia. It’s just stupid and won’t be a nostalgic experience. It’s gonna be nuking the fridge all over again.

• There’s not even the hint of a story yet that could be any fuckin’ good. Just a retread of Dark! vs. Light! Struggle! Yawn Part Deux, Electric Boogaloo.

Sadly, it won’t be a terrible movie that hits people over the head with brickbats of badness, like the prequel atrocities. Rather, it’s going to be just good enough. Luke! Leia! Han and Chewie!!! It’s the 80s again! Badness new villain so badassss lightsaberrrrs!!! Captain Kirk with his shirt of–oh wait, different Abrams flick, my bad. It’s gonna be a lot of lights ‘n’ pew pew pew done competently, and people will yap yap yap, and then, after six months or so, the hangover will set in: Oh fuck, Star Wars still sucks.

Yes it does. And will.

2

Judging from the Star Trek reboots and the trailers shown so far, there won’t be much in the way of new ideas or stories. It will be recycled imagery and nostalgia pandering in a competently made package. It will make eleventy billion dollars.

3

Verily, you have sussed it!

4

Meh, what’s left in motives for bad guys these days?
All the Marvel and James Bond flicks seem to have the same problem. They’re running out of unique villians. They’re either power hungry or bent on revenge.
I think they’ll hit the right marks with this one with just enough for the masses to say “hmm, yeah, it was pretty good”.
All they have to do is be better than the prequels and people will be happy.

5

With Star Wars, nostalgia works, what can you say? The prequels were perfectly good movies, but they get trashed because they were not the Originals…people want to see Han and Chewie, Hip Replacement Surgery, not anything fresh.

6

Or they’re batshit crayzeee OHMYGAWDDD!!!

Yeh. Star Wars has been REDEEMED I cried!!! blahblahblah…

7

If by “perfectly good movies” you mean “vomit with extra butyric acid,” then yeah, I totally agree with you!!!

Annnnd… I totally agree with you!!!

8

I forget who likened Star Wars fans to domestic abuse victims, but he had a rather tasteless point. “But Star Wars is different now, it’s promised me it’s going to change, clean up its act! It’s never going to hurt me again, you’ll see, it’s going to love me and we’ll be together forever, just like we first were”. I think most of the OH MAN THIS IS GOING TO BE SO GREAT STAR WARS IS REALLY BACK stuff comes from fans battered by the prequels but trying to convince themselves that this time it’s going to be different.

9

The issue is that the original Star Wars came out with no expectation. It was a young man’s film by someone recreating 1930s style adventure films.

Now the expectations mean it will probably be ponderous and fraught, especially since Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, which tried to do what the original Star Wars did, got hammered.

(For the record, I think the refrigerator was an absolutely brilliant setpiece, perfectly in the spirit of the films it was emulating. So what if it wasn’t logical or even possible – it was fun and it worked.)

10

Totally. Look, the original trilogy was a product of its time, and that’s why it was cool. 70s ‘n’ 80s. You can’t get that back. You.CAN’T.get.that.back. It’s been 35+ years since RotJ. Deal.

11

Yeah, that’s why it worked. It was Space Opera writ large with some 70s sophistication thrown in (e.g., Vader has to defer to Tarkin, the Emperor is not seen, etc.).

Well, it couldn’t do that, since it was dragging RotLA behind it.

If I squint, I can kinda see it, but there was no such thing as a “lead-lined” refrigerator (shown so you know he won’t die of radiation poisoning–doh!), and the shock wave and ensuing bouncin’ around would have killed his ass a hundred times over–just from what was shown on screen.

12

Here’s my contribution to the anti-anticipation: I didn’t know it was coming. Now I know. I’m sorry that several brain cells have had to be sacrificed to contain that information.

13

You’re still doing better than the rest of us, it seems.

14

No, the prequels were terrible, terrible, terrible movies. Not just ‘not what the fans wanted’, not just ‘annoying new stuff’, and not just Jar-Jar, they were badly made films. The effects technology was bare-none but the scripts/dialog and acting was stilted, wooden, uninspired, clunky, and sometimes downright awful. The prequels were exactly what Star Wars films are not supposed to be: Soulless, heartless, empty shell compilations of video game cut scenes. And the blame lands clearly on Lucas’ head. He had not directed a film since the original Star Wars in '77 and it showed.

Say what you will about JJ Abrams but the guy knows how to tell a story visually, which is what the original Star Wars was all about. I’m still looking forward to having my 16-year-old memory of first seeing Phantom Menace permanently redacted! :smiley:

15

I’ve fortunately managed to escape most of the buzz (and I know the trailers and such are out there if I look for them, but I haven’t bothered), but I’ve had low expectations for this movie ever since I found out they’d gotten Abrams to direct it.

16

Exactly. Abrams is really good at producing flashy, colorful movies full of quips, action, and noise. If that’s all you want, fine. But he does this at the expense of character, plot, coherence, and logic.

17

I don’t care at all. I stopped caring about Star Wars sometime midway thru Phantom Menace.

Star Wars* was a fantastic, fun film but it’s been a steady decline ever since.

*No, I don’t mean A New Hope; fuck that shit.

18

All those complaints (especially about wooden acting) can be directed at the Originals as well. Cushing, Guinness were very good, but besides Ford in ESB none of the leads ever rose beyond mediocre. Hamil in the ANH was cringe worthy at times.

19

Um, good? I don’t really want to know about the story. I want to go into it blind. Trailers and teasers overload and give away far too much these days.

I agree with others that I’m a bit down on it since I’ve never really loved anything by JJ Abrams (the Star Trek movies are entertaining but also flawed) but I’m willing to give it a chance. Having a John Williams score alone will help tons.

20

Of course, the big question on everyone’s mind is: How are they going to shoe-horn Boba-Fett into the new movie?

Ya GOTS to have some Boba Fett! Because. . .because. . .actually, I don’t know why. His armor looks good?

He was in 2 of the first 3 movies filmed, and he only had 4 lines. Well, 5 lines if you include, “AAAAaaaaaahhhhh. . .” as a blind Han Solo accidentally knocks him into the [del]sandworm[/del] sarlacc pit. But he looks so cool, they included him and his father in the prequels as a major part of the plot. After all, if there’s one thing people want right after seeing Darth Vader as a child, that’s seeing Boba Fett as a child.

Hey, I understand that in some shit novelization, Fett escapes the sarlacc. Let’s keep our fingers crossed. We may see him return and utter a couple more simple sentences, or a scream or 2.