That Luke was eeeEEEEvil.
Your first point was kind of hand-waved away in a brief conversation between Finn and Rey. Finn said something like “How did you do that?” after her amazing piloting skills first time out in the Falcon. Rey says something like “I can’t explain it. It just happened.”. Neatly sidestepping the issue while simultaneously giving the audience the first hint that she’s very strong in the Force.
I think your second point is bang on. I was surprised how much screen time he got, and expected it to be more of a cameo (although not as much of a cameo as Luke got!). I thought it might be coming, but it was still a punch in the gut when it did. I could almost cry when I just see his face in an advert now. Have to keep reminding myself it’s not real!
Well first off i thought they did a decent job of showing Rey was not actually good at driving the Falcon, she wasn’t piloting it like a hot shot she was barely keeping it in the air. They also showed that storm troopers ARE trained to go toe to toe with lightsaber users, and that Rey was a good fighter. Granted a lightsaber is not a staff, but it’s not completely different either.
Maybe in the first few seconds, but going through the downed Star Destroyer superstructure seemed pretty hot-shot to me!
True. I think very minor changes to the script could have made this kind of point clearer, I think. Hell, just give swords to some of the new stormtroopers (and show Finn practice dueling or something)!
I saw it last night and thoroughly enjoyed it.
It wasn’t any profound story and didn’t have any jaw-dropping reveals, but it was fun, exciting and definitely help my attention throughout.
It was everything a Star Wars film should be. 9.5 stars out of 10.
Saw it last night and loved it. Yes, the plot was a retread - I don’t care. I really enjoyed getting to know the new characters, who, thank god, had actual personalities and motivations beyond, ‘well, this is my job, I guess I’d better go take care of that bad guy over there’ (yeah, I’ve been doing some prequel comparison). I was a little worried that Finn would get on my nerves - he’s so overly excitable - but he grew on me quick, and I’m looking forward to more interaction between him and Rey (romantic or platonic). And thank you, Hollywood, for finally throwing some decent scripts behind action movies with female protagonists.
I didn’t know Han was going to die. I’m not ever very good at guessing what’s going to happen in movies, though to be fair I don’t really try. When he walked out on that platform, I realized what was gonna happen, and I basically stopped breathing for a couple of minutes. There was a woman behind me who cried for the rest of the movie.
He was actually quite good in a completely terrible movie called “Age of Adaline” earlier this year.
Also, he had my favorite line of the night: “That’s not how the Force works!”
I was inadvertently spoiled that Han would die. I think I wouldn’t have been particularly surprised, though. Being spoiled, I knew it was going to happen as soon as Han and Chewie split up to plant the bombs – Chewie would never let Han die without dying first if they were together.
My thoughts on the problems people have had with Carrie Fisher/Leia: This woman has been actively fighting something longer than any one else-- she was participating in rebellions before Luke or Han or anyone. That’s 40+ years of fighting rebellions and resistances. Plus, along the way, she’s lost her son, her husband and her brother. And now the First Order has just flexed its muscle, and she has to be thinking “Fucking-A didn’t I already do this?”
She’s got to be exhausted. Why the hell would Carrie Fisher still be playing a spunky, feisty freedom fighter 40 years later? She’s older, tired, heartbroken, maternal. Fisher nailed it.
All in all, I loved this movie. Yes, lots of parallels to ANH, but so what? I was a toddler when ANH came out, so I never got to really experience it properly. I saw ESB in theaters when I was five, but hadn’t yet seen ANH. A lot of the stuff was over my head. Over the years, I’d see bits and pieces of ANH on TV, but would have to be in bed by 9, so I never saw the whole thing until I was a teenager. Watching this movie, I think I finally had that “Wow,” moment I never got from ANH.
I have been kind of trashing the movie on IMDB, but I did object when someone chimed in and complained about “idiots” who like this movie because they never saw the original. I objected that if you had not seen the original, there is probably no reason not to find this a legitimately good movie.
I have also enjoyed reboots of other franchises, like the new Spiderman origin movie or the BSG reboot. Or for that matter, even the first Trek reboot by Abrams. So at first glance, that might seem hypocritical.
But I think the difference is that they didn’t try to say “all that stuff with Peter Parker happened years ago, but now a new character is just happening to be a high school science nerd who gets bitten by yet another spider.”
So if they were going to remake/reboot the franchise, they should have just done so. But they were hamstrung by wanting to bring back some of the old cast, and ended up being neither fish nor fowl. It didn’t help that they already made this error in Return of the Jedi.
Star Wars has always been a sort of cyclical epic. What a character on Star Trek DS9 referred to as the “Recursive Epic”. Multiple generations going through the same general story, with the difference being how each different generation handles the details.
This isn’t just in the movies, but also in the games, like Knights of the Old Republic, which has Jedi and Sith and a Republic and an Empire in a struggle for control of the galaxy. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
I feel like people are missing the point when they complain about it being derivative or too heavy with call backs. It HAD to be this way. Phantom Menace was terrible at being a Star Wars movie. JJ Abrams got flack for Star Trek, weathering accusations that he didn’t understand it.
So for this, he essentially did a remake of A New Hope. Similar storyline and plot points, all of this shows that he understands what made the OT good in the first place. It’s all nicely updated with improved practical effects and better diversity in the cast, but it’s the same basic framework. And now, having established his credibility, he gets to introduce new twists and original material in the next film, and we will be willing to go along for that ride, because he’s earned it.
I loved it. I was 3 when ANH came out, and I’ve been hooked ever since. Phantom Menace was the biggest letdown of my life, and I’ve been waiting for someone to do it right ever since. This delivered. It’s not perfect, sure, there are some flaws that can be dissected, but that’s going to happen in a fantasy setting like Star Wars. I was grinning like an idiot the whole time.
But the best part was that I saw it with my kids, 8 and 11, who have never seen Star Wars in the theater before, although they’ve seen them at home of course. Watching their faces, their excited bouncing up and down when The Falcon was revealed, when Han and Chewie showed up, when Leia appeared? It was amazing. Abrams delivered an experience for kids and adults alike that holds up to the original.
This isn’t really something that can be laid entirely at Abrams’ feet - it’s been baked into the setting since the first movie. Luke, also, was someone who had never piloted a space-going vessel before, and certainly never had any training in dog fighting, before he blew up the Death Star. Being strong in the Force means just being naturally good at certain things, even without training. If anything, Abrams’ take on the movie is even more grounded than the previous ones - it takes Rey a few minutes of piloting the Falcon before she’s got enough control over it to stop bouncing off the landscape, which is at least a few cuts above, “Let’s try spinning!” in terms of depicting an amateur pilot.
Also, Finn isn’t just some random guy who picked up a lightsaber, he’s been trained as a soldier since infancy, and as we saw when he was attacked by the 'trooper with the shockstick, that includes some melee training. I think that’s background enough that he could hold his own, at least for a little while, against a trained but badly wounded force user. Similarly, while Rey doesn’t appear to have any formal combat training, we know that she can handle herself in a fight, as we saw when those two guys tried to steal BB-8 on Jakku. And she appears to be significantly stronger in the Force than Ren, which, piled on top of his wounds and fragile emotional state (dude just murdered his dad), is enough to justify her kicking his ass in my mind.
The station they were in wasn’t unmanned - there were a bunch of dead Stormtroopers on the ground. I’m not sure it was established that there were multiple such stations - I figured that it was the only one, and that whatever they did physically disabled it in such a way that it couldn’t be re-raised from the command deck. Alternatively, they could have raised it again, but by that time, the Resistance fighters were already inside its perimeter, so it wouldn’t have made a difference.
Pharasma going along with it just because someone stuck a blaster in her face is a harder sell for me. I guess she figured that a bunch of one-man fighters didn’t present a serious risk to the Starkiller, shield or no, so she might as well do what she can to keep herself alive. But given the history of the galaxy, that’s kind of a dumb assumption to make.
This one, I agree with whole-heartedly. Abrams doesn’t quite seem to get the scale of space. He did the same thing in the first Star Trek movie, where Spock is stranded on a distant world, but still can see Vulcan getting destroyed with his naked eye. Also, I imagine that most casual viewers of the film came away with the impression that the Starkiller had wiped out the Republic entirely. Hux gives that big speech about “Today being the end of the Republic,” then we see a planet explode. Obviously, the Republic consists of more than that one world, but if you’re not up on the lore, the movie seems to indicate that that was it: the entire Republic is gone. It wasn’t even clear what world that was supposed to be until much later in the movie, when someone mentions that it was the “Hozen” (or something) system, and not (as I took it at first) Coruscant.
Now that I’ve had time to process what I saw, I have the following minor nitpicks:
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Would have been nice to see Rey exhibit Force use when we meet her. Have her do something, but have no idea it is the Force that gives her that ability. It would have to be something small that seems like nothing to her.
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I found Rey being able to fly the Millennium Falcon as though she could just jump into a complex cockpit and know how everything worked took away from the scene. Or maybe that was her Force moment and I didn’t get it.
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Finn needed a little more back story. Even just a 5 second glimpse of his Stormtrooper life would have helped. Like something that really showed him as one of them, maybe a barracks seen as they all form out to gear up. Just something.
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Kylo Ren was a bit too wimpy a character. However, I did still like the character overall and the acting of Driver, but some bit of gravity or something was missing.
And question: what are the capsules everyone wears on their clothing? Energy packs? Space pens? ???
I don’t know that it necessarily had to be this way, but I don’t really blame them for taking this tack. There’s a lot riding on the film, and if it turned out as bad as Phantom Menace, it would have damaged the entire brand to a huge degree. Playing it safe for the first one, establishing that the new franchise owners get what made the series good in the first place, was a smart move. Hopefully, having built up some trust, they’ll be more willing to go in different directions with the later films.
JJ Abrams isn’t directing the rest of the trilogy. Rian Johnson is doing Episode VIII, and Colin Trevorrow episode IX.
Thinking about the movie, I really don’t mind that it wasn’t all that original, or the world all that well explained and tied together, or whatever other complains I could nitpick because I really wasn’t expecting anything else.
Except. There really was no attempt whatsoever at surprising the audience. You could literally tell how every single scene was going to unravel. I kinda wish they had tried.
It’s established just beforehand that she can fly a spaceship. Remember that they were initially heading towards another spaceship that got destroyed and only took the Falcon (‘a pile of junk’) because it was the only one left.
Star Wars. Star Wars never changes.
They showed that in the flashback when she touched the saber. What’s more, she was good with the staff which suggested training of some type
Indeed. Kylo Ren seems very much like what Vader might have been if he hadn’t been crippled at Mustafar - young, immensely powerful, and filled with rage. For Vader, ending up a cyborg on life support made him cold and able to move past the anger that lead him to the dark side, where Kylo still has that anger driving him.
When she touched the saber, she got a Force-induced vision of what appeared to be Kylo and his knights turning on Luke and his other students. Whether that means that Rey was actually there when it happened isn’t clear. It’s also not necessarily the case that that was a flashback - she also saw the future in the same vision, when she foresaw Kylo coming after her in the snowy forest on Starkiller Base. So what that scene might have been something yet to come.