Star Wars: The Force Awakens - Seen It (Assume Spoilers Within)

Cafe Society
301

And Kylo Ren is not a Sith. “Sith” isn’t a generic term for any Force-sensitive person who follows the Dark Side; it refers to a specific idealogy, originating from the ancient Sith species that dwelt on Korriban tens of thousands of years ago and leant the name to the Dark Side Force-sensitives that were cast out of Republic space 7000 years before the events of the original trilogy. (In the old EU, anyway; we shall have to see how much of that backstory is part of the new EU.)

Snoke, presumably, is not a Sith, so he wouldn’t call himself by a Sith title or assign one to his pupil. Instead, he’s given Kylo leave to create his own order, the Knights of Ren.

The galaxy is a big place. Presumably, the Republic fleet is off in Republic space, dealing with its own problems, and is too stretched out to commit a full invasion force to the corner of the Third World (Third Galaxy?) where the First Order holds sway.

Cortosis weave weapons popped up extensively in the old EU and have made appearances in Episode III and in Clone Wars.

302

The Sith were an order of Dark Side users that died with Vader and the Emperor in Return of the Jedi. Snoke and Kylo Ren aren’t Sith (probably), so they wouldn’t use a title that belongs to the Sith.

A few people have mentioned it above. The First Order and the Republic are two groups in a galaxy with a lot of powers now. But the Republic doesn’t want to engage in direct warfare with the First Order, so they’ve been covertly assisting the Resistance with their fight.

303

I think there’s some subtlety to it. Disney is spending gazillions of dollars on the movies. So it definitely benefits them to make a movie people enjoy, so they’ll see it over again, and maintain their level of interest for the next several movies.

At the same time, Disney isn’t particularly interested in taking chances. So they’d rather do everything competently and well and safely and make a movie that is a guaranteed 7/10 or 8/10 rather than risking something more daring that might be a 10/10 but might be a 3/10 if it doesn’t quite succeed.

That said, I don’t think it’s just wishful thinking to say that the job of this movie was to reignite people’s love of the franchise, leaving the next two more wide open to go in interesting new directions… and of course most of the callbacks have been called back. Who’s left to randomly show up in episodes 8 and 9 that we haven’t already seen? Lando, maybe? He’s not in the same universe of being beloved as everyone who already showed up. Possibly a force ghost of Yoda?

When it comes right down to it, I walked out of the theater (twice already) with a big smile on my face, excited to see what happens next… which was really not the case after The Phantom Menace.

304

There was a throwaway line before the invasion of Starkiller that “without the Republic fleet, we’re doomed.” I assume one of the planets they blew up early on was Coruscant.

The idea I like is the Republic didn’t take over where the Empire used to be, but rather neither the Republic nor First Order are as powerful as the old Empire, both essentially being a smaller confederation of planets, and the Republic doesn’t want to provoke direct conflict since they’re weak so they have a kind of “proxy war” going through the Rebel Alliance. Essentially Cold War tactics.

I think that’s maybe a bit too handwavey, but it works.

Some robots had them in Episode 3, but overall I think it’s more jarring if you’ve never touched ancillary material. The RPGs like KOTOR have invented tons of weapons that can block lightsabers.

305

And in Return of the Jedi. They were carried (but never used) by Palpatine’s Red Guard.

306

Too many people have independently had that thought for it to be a handwave. I think there might even have been a line or two directly stating as much.

307

OK, I’ve seen it twice now, here are my thoughts:

-Overall, a lot of fun, definitely enjoyed it, definitely already excited for the next one. Probably 7.5/10

-Definite high point for me was Rey, particularly her interactions with Fin early in the movie. The part where she was fixing the Falcon and pointing at the piece she needed was just hilarious and charming. The two of them have great (non-sexual) chemistry

-Harrison Ford was used more, and used far better, than I expected, and I was totally satisfied with how he died. He had just finished sabotaging the evil weapon, and died trying to save his son from the dark side… and there’s a possibility that it will end up that he succeeded, if we assume there’s a chance Kylo Ren will end up being redeemed

-I like the idea that Poe Dameron will be around but not one of the main characters. There should be some badasses on the goodguy side who aren’t the main focus of the story, and he was quite enjoyable in his interactions with Fin

-How awesome was a blaster beam being force-frozen in flight?

-The production design and visuals were (not surprisingly) fantastic. A ruined star destroyer crashed on the planet, the radiation effects for the new superweapon, etc. BB8 was also a fantastic design, fitting right into the established Star Wars droid look while clearly being his own new thing

-The general acting, dialog, and flow of the screenplay was top notch

What didn’t I like?
-I agree that there were a few too many callbacks to the originals, most obviously the new death star. Given that we really know nothing about the one planet that it did blow up, did it really serve any purpose? Seems like the movie could have been 95% the same, with all the same story beats and everything, without that

-It’s obviously not crucial to the understanding of the movie, but I do wish they’d explained a bit better the relationship between the Republic, the Resistance, and the First Order. I was trying to figure it out better on a second watching, but failed.

-The plot relied an ENORMOUS amount on various coincidences. Which actually feels pretty Star Wars-y but still was a bit irksome

-The giant rolling tentacle monsters didn’t really work

-Much as I liked her, Rey was a slightly implausible good at everything. She’s a super starship mechanic! And pilot! And speaks droid! And is an expert in hand to hand combat! And learns to use the force way faster than Luke did! (Although if it turns out that she had been trained as a jedi and then made to forget it, that might help explain things…)

-It’s one thing for Fin to see the violence of an actual battle and throw off his conditioning and training. It’s another for him to be gleefully killing the people who were presumably the only friends he’d ever had moments later (when they’re stealing the Tie Fighter). Also, if he’s been raised and brainwashed by the First Order his whole life, how did ever hear of Han Solo to begin with?

308

I’m not buying the prediction that Rey was previously trained in the Force then brainwashed to forget it by Luke. First-off, don’t you think everyone would have recognized her? Certainly Kylo Ren would have, since they’re seemingly the same age and would have trained together. I’m also not sure that I buy her being Luke’s daughter - Ben and Yoda would have strongly counselled him against getting involved in a relationship, seeing as it led to Anakin’s fall.

309

In addition, the flashback she gets when touching Luke’s light saber seems to indicate that she was very young when her family left… 8 or so. (My wife thinks that the hand holding her, pulling her away, belonged to the “this is worth a quarter portion” pawnshop guy… so maybe he was paid by someone or other to keep an eye on her?)

Arguing in favor of the previous-knowlege-of-The-Force theory is the way she reacts during her duel with Kylo Ren when he says something about The Force… almost as if actually hearing those words made her remember a bit more that she already knew.
It’s certainly also possible that there’s some more mystical force-knowledge-transference thing going on… the ghost of Yoda has been with her all along preparing her to become a Jedi, or some such thing.

Or maybe we’ll never find out.

310

I saw it a few hours ago, and just slogged through this already-lengthy thread. I thought it was more-or-less established that Rey was Luke’s daughter (and Kylo Ren’s cousin) so I almost expected the last line of the film to be, “Luke, I am your daughter.”

And Finn was interesting. I barely watched the prequel trilogy but thought the stormtroopers were supposed to be clones. In this film, Finn and the others were stolen from their parents and raised from a young age as stormtroopers. I’m wondering if the future films are going to explore his background.

And the movie didn’t show us the scene in which Kylo Ren’s was recovered from the planet before it blew up. If this had been a Marvel movie, that would perhaps have been the post-credit scene.

311

Ben is the guy who told Luke that Vader murdered his father. Luke is the guy who, upon telling Ben there’s still good in his father – as per Padmé’s last words! – gets dismissed out of hand; and Ben, upon being told that Luke refuses to kill his own father, replied “Then the Emperor has already won.”

Luke, of course, disregarded him; and Luke was, of course, right to do so.

Yoda told Luke that, if he left now, he could help his friends, but he would destroy all for which they’d fought and suffered; Luke of course disregarded him; all for which they’d fought and suffered of course wasn’t destroyed.

They kept steering him wrong; he ignored them, and proved them wrong; why start listening to the “Into Exile I Must Go; Failed I Have” crew after getting the win?

312

I’m sure someone actually invested in the franchise can elaborate but, as I recall, they were clones in the prequels but that didn’t work so well for whatever reason and they went to traditional soldiers. In the beginning (I think when Fin helps Poe escape), the general dude remarks to Phasma that perhaps they should return to using clones since her troopers are so ill trained and fallible.

313

Warning: total amateur here

Luke’s light saber in the movie. That is Anakin’s, right? The one that Luke was fighting with when Vader cut off his hand in Empire? So that thing fell and has been recovered, right?

It’s not the one Luke actually uses to defeat Vader and all throughout Return of the Jedi. He must still have that one on him(and didn’t it have a green saber?).

So…not only do they have Luke’s saber, they have the one that somehow fell?

Do I have any of this right or am I just confused?

314

Yes, that’s the one he dropped when he fought Vader on Bespin. It must have been fished out of the base’s ductwork or <fill in the blank>.

I don’t know if they ever gave a solid reason, even in the EU. I think the general consensus is just that the Empire was big and powerful enough to have an army without the need for clones. Based on The Force Awakens, there’s a line that they abducted children to make them Storm Troopers which I’m sure we were supposed to find abhorrent except the old Jedi Order basically did the same thing.

315

Not only did that one have a green blade, it also had a very different looking hilt:

So, yes, the one in this movie is Anakin’s, the one that fell in Bespin.

316

The one Anakin used to murder a bunch of children, you can hear their screams before Rey walks into the room.

317

I remember a scene in this movie in which someone wielded a lightsaber against someone with a metal weapon. The two struck each other as if they were both solid objects. I always thought of a lightsaber as a powerful laser beam with a defined length, and that it would cut through almost anything. Isn’t that how it works?

318

Saw it last Friday. The glow is still there. I’ll be watching it again, soon. My only ‘oh, come on!’ moment was when Han stepped out onto the ramp to meet his son. My thought was “They’re still not putting railings on those things?”

I actually preferred his childishness to Anakin’s similar fits that were portrayed as a sign of deep angst or something. By comparison, it’s showing that Anakin’s fits were also childish.

Yes. I also think that the meta-arc is circling back to the same conflict. Last time Luke, Leia, and Han beat the dark side, but were not able to set up a stable Neo-Jedi school. Something went wrong and the conflict re-began.

Now we’re circling back to the same conflict. Can our heroes, new and old, win in a way that finally sets things on a truly stable footing? I really want that to be what Luke sequestered himself for - to use the force to fish in the future for the path to success. They don’t just need to win again, they need to win and get it right.

319

Political Wonk Wank…

It’s an interesting contrast between what we know of the Empire and what we know of the First Order.

The Empire is essentially a dictatorship. Palpatine runs things directly and hands down policy to the regional governors rather than through any fake attempt at legislation. It’s a tried and true system seen recently in Camodia with Pol Pot or even today’s North Korea. There’s a godlike leader and lackeys - however exalted - to carry out the leaders decisions and policy. Palpatine’s hung up on the Death Star? Of course a second one will be built. He can’t be wrong.

The First Order, however, differs strongly from that in that it appears to be a classic Fascism. A strong cult of personality combined with very early indoctrination combined with the belief that the whole is more important than the individual leads to excessive loyalty in both troops and citizens. Fascism’s are - historically - harder to knock over than dictatorships because of the way the citizenry become invested in the success of the society. Rather than cheering when Palpatine dies, the average person who grew up under the First Order can be expected to consider the death of Snoke a personal blow.

I don’t know if they’ll go as deeply into it as they can. Well all know that when Star Wars gets into political or economic theory things go to hell in a hurry. But it’s still a strong difference between the two governments that we’re presented with.

320

Heh. Like for the re-established Republic, the First Order of business is to mop up remnants of the old Empire…