One assumes that if Otto Skorzeny had become president of Venezuela in 1946, people in 1976 wouldn’t consider his regime to be “on the run” either.
Late edit to the above: I don’t even know if it’s accurate to say that they “just” built the giant star-eating-planet-ship since it seemed to be in much more complete condition than Death Star v2.0, for instance. The First Order didn’t come across to me at all like a new start-up organization.
All this is sort of besides the point that the bad guys lacked any gravitas or menace. Wanking in some excuse for the young general doesn’t make him any better an antagonist, much less villain.
One assumes he wouldn’t be leaning on people who were infants when he came into power, either. By 1976, he’s have people who were in their 20’s or 30’s thirty years ago and now, you know, have the benefit of another three decades experience before appointing them to command his giant doomsday ship.
And yet, it only took the Empire four years to have Death Star 2 as nearly-complete as it was. The First Order had 30 years to improve on the concept.
If they weren’t a new organization, they would have been present and active during the events of the original trilogy. Why did they never come to the Empire’s aid?
People who grew up before the new order came into power, in other words. People who weren’t raised to believe that the Leader is always right, who might have been raised to believe in other idealogies, who are capable of passing those ideas on to the younger generation.
In other words, potential subversives. Threats to the regime.
Because they’re essentially just a rebranded Empire under new management. Again, it’s like asking why Xfinity wasn’t helping Comcast ten years ago.
You can’t act as though they’re “established” because they’ve been around for 30 years and yet they need kids to run the show because they got rid of the old guard. After thirty years, there’s already a new old guard.
People with experience. People who rebuilt the new regime. People who know where the toilets are located and which rack has the Death Star keys.
In other words, competent people. Which Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum most certainly did not come across as, as they fucked shit up and pointed at one another and looked ready to get into a slapfight in front of their dad.
Except that they’re not. They’re using the imagery of the Empire, but they have as much to do with it as George Lincoln Rockwell had to do with the Third Reich, as much as the Third Reich had to do with the Holy Roman Empire, as much as the Holy Roman Empire had to do with the Roman Empire. They’re johnny-come-latelies co-opting an old idea for their own purposes.
We don’t know how long it’s been since Snoke took over or since the purges occurred.
Exactly. They’re incompetant and the Resistance beats them because the regime values idealogy over competence.
Who cares? My point was, that’s what came across when I was watching the film. Like I said: More stormtroopers, more of the same ships, another Death Star, another dude in a mask. If you want to say this was all new stuff and clearly a new group, go for it. Didn’t look like that at all to me.
You obviously care a whole lot more about Star Wars than I do. As a casual viewer, it looked like Empire v2.0. Whether or not it was is pretty much irrelevant when that’s what I’m seeing in the theater.
Yeah, remember when I said that the bad guys lack any gravitas or menace? We didn’t need to spend a whole bunch of posts on silly remarks about Nazis in South America to just agree on this point.
What the excuse for the bad guys being a couple dorks is secondary to the fact that the bad guys are a couple dorks in a movie where I’m supposed to view them as a menace.
Who says dorks can’t be menacing? Pol Pot went from being a college professor to building mountains of human skulls. Kim Jong-Un grew up in trendy European boarding schools and today he’s a god-king. Hitler was a perpetual failure who talked his way into power and then half-assed it until it all fell apart around him. Fascist regimes are often capable of wreaking great destruction even when the people running them are completely incompetent.
If anything, having the evil mass-murdering empire be run by people who are inept, blinded by idealogy, blind to their own failures, and wracked by self-doubt only makes them more real than the one-dimensional mustache-twirling villians of yesteryear.
I was bored/annoyed almost immediately, and kept checking the time (I was this close to leaving, but sunk cost). I actually liked the last hour better than what preceded it (the opposite of what many other people have said), and I liked Finn and Rey, probably because they were somewhat original. Overall, though, I agree with James Berardinelli:
Also, I love Adam Driver in “Girls”, but just couldn’t take him seriously here.
Sorry meant Fin
Adam Driver is 32. So, for Harrison Ford to spin him in his early 40s is not unthinkable.
Finn put up a good show against Ren too.
Indeed not! I’m in my early forties and my youngest is 3.
Its a galaxy far, far away from a long long time ago.
The Universe is 15 billion years old.
I would assume they had the physics worked out way before we even crawled out of the oceans.
What was the speculation?
It probably was but beyond that, from a story telling perspective, he had to die. He was Rey’s Ben Kenobi (her Mentor character) and he was Ren’s crossroad to the Dark Side. Both those roles say he had to die.
ETA: I didn’t think Ren was hitting his wound; I thought he was literally beating his chest. I think it was a way to show he was in no control of his emotions (in contrast to Rey who was at peace).