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

Cafe Society
621

I work on the online banking side of a major American bank. People complain about how long it takes us to fix the smallest of bugs that make it to production because of how tight our production controls are. If we want to intentionally bring down a system dozens of people are involved in approving it and then a painful amount of work to document and test whatever will be done before you actually get to do it.

But in the Empire apparently any infantry soldier has the necessary access and know how to single handedly take an entire planetary defense system offline. Without so much as an “are you sure?” prompt.

More than anything, that makes me want to join the Empire.

Of course, when Lena Dunham’s boyfriend senses that Han Solo is on the planet while the shields are still up it apparently never occurred to him to spread the word that the Resistance had found a way through the shields.

(Later I might do the math on just how precise Han Solo’s reflexes are to manually take a ship out of faster than light speed within the maybe 100 mile distance between shields and planetary surface. Though if slower than light speed stuff is blocked by the shields not sure how the planet gun arms itself with all the mass from the local sun. Or how the planet, once it shoots that wad gets to another star system or how it then shoots its projectile at sublight speeds from one solar system to another in the span of a few minutes.)

622

At our theater, opening night, the crowd was pretty nuts. Ran into a generally very serious guy I know, who happened to be dressed as a Jedi Knight.

Main things I recall include cheering at the opening, riotous laughter and applause at the Falcon’s reveal, and most folks waiting around to see what was after the credits (Nothing. One guy remarked “Thanks, Marvel!”)

And yeah, the instant bread was a very nice touch. The bit where she pours the mix into a shallow bowl of water and stirs the obviously thin mixture with her finger did as much to illustrate her poverty as the thin stuff immediately plumping up into a space muffin did to illustrate the advanced technology/fantasy of the setting.

623

I can’t read this thread yet so forgive me if already asked, but, is it possible to make out what’s happening through the lens flair?

624

Exactly. Luke had the briefest of training when he did the force grab.

I still like the theory that Rey was a very young padawan who was abandoned on Jakka and had her memory scrubbed. She had some force training and it’s coming back to her naturally even if she doesn’t understand it.

I’m hoping she’s not Luke’s kid but has some connection ( I think it would be awesome if she’s Wedges’ kid.)

625

I’m not saying there are zero lens flares(I don’t remember), but he doesn’t do his lens flare thing at all in this movie. I noticed none. He matched the old style from the first three movies more or less.

626

Sure, but does anyone say that pre-Darth Anakin was a good character? I mean, Kylo Ren is better than Jar Jar Binks too for all the faint praise that damns him with.

627

Agree with this for the most part, with the exception that, again, I’m not seeing this as a retread of Episode 4. The only other thing is, I don’t think Abram’s is doing the follow on movies, so the last part of this seems off, since he won’t be (afaik) involved in the next movies. I wish he were, since I think he brought much needed redemption and life back into the series. I think you were spot on in your 4th paragraph…that’s what I was trying to get at in my post earlier, but you said it much better. It’s too early to tell at this point how all of this interconnects or even much about the various characters before this movie happened, so there are a lot of details that will hopefully get fleshed out and filled in in the next two.

628

In his book The Secret History of Star Wars, Michael Kaminski points out how that moment in the Wampa cave, where Luke moves the saber with his mind, is the moment when the presentation of the Force completely changed.

In the first film, the Force was very shadowy and mysterious, and seemed to be mostly mental. Ben’s “These aren’t the droids you’re looking for” routine. Luke hearing Ben’s voice in the X-wing cockpit (did he really hear it, or was it his own mind reminding him of what his mentor would have told him?). Luke calming himself and concentrating sufficiently to make a difficult torpedo shot. Even Vader’s force-choke could be read as a mental ability, an amped-up Jedi mind trick to make Admiral What’s-His-Name believe that he couldn’t breathe. You could understand how someone like Han might be skeptical of the Force–maybe it is all just “simple tricks and nonsense.” There was very little there that looked real to an outsider, nothing that you could prove.

But in the Wampa cave, Luke explicitly uses the Force to move a physical object. Later, of course, Yoda will be lifting the X-wing out of the swamp, and Vader will be telekinetically throwing all sorts of stuff at Luke. It’s a definite change in the treatment of the Force. No longer a subtle, mystical thing that might do no more than enhance your will power, it becomes a comic-book style super power that lets you move objects without touching them and do impossible acrobatics. How could anyone doubt the reality of the Force if they saw such things going on?

Thinking on this, it occurs to me that this also has something to with why Luke didn’t progress in the Force more quickly in the first film. Because there wasn’t yet a full conception of what he might progress to. In a different reality, where the Force remained as subtle and mysterious as it was in Star Wars, hearing Ben’s voice and making a seemingly impossible shot might have been the gold standard of what Luke could be expected to achieve with the Force on his side.

These days we all know the Force can let you levitate objects, but in 1977 we didn’t. Rey has to progress farther and faster than Luke did in a single film, because our expectations of what a Jedi can do are much higher now.

629

OK, so Finn wants to break free of being a Stormtrooper 'cos he doesn’t like killing people and isn’t just a faceless mook in a helmet, I get that. But does the first action of his new life really have to be enthusisastically machine-gunning the other faceless mooks in helmets who were his buddies not 10 minutes before? Dude, not cool.

630

There’s a big one when Kylo is on the bridge of his ship, watching the Starkiller fire for the first time.

He’s not. Next film is directed by Rian Johnson, who did the fantastic Looper. Colin Treverow, who directed Jurassic World, is doing the third.

Those other guys are total dicks, though. That one guy, TK421? Never flushes after he uses the head.

631

And Fin was the guy all sad about his one Stormtrooper buddy getting shot and smearing blood on his helmet some six hours prior.

Plenty more Stormtrooper blood where that came from!

632

And he always spends a lot of time in there… that’s why he’s never at his post.

633

I’m not just a mindless killing machine like the rest of you! PEW PEW PEW PEW RATATATATATAT BOOM SPLAT ARGH!

634

He’s supposed to be a killer! Just because he’s rebelling against his conditioning doesn’t mean he’s free of it.

635

It’s ambiguous depending on how you assume Ben used the Force to distract the Stormtroopers at the tractor beam. I always assumed he implanted a sound in their minds but you can argue he used telekinesis to make noise.

636

Well I should clarify that I like Kylo and how he was depicted, not just liked him in comparison to Anakin. I mentioned the comparison to Anakin because that was the most obvious comparison. Kylo’s story is how Anakin’s should have been done. Whiny, moments of weakness and failing, living up to a standard he was born into, but done in a more realistic, non-annoying way. The dialogue and how he expressed himself was just well done that I’m not surprised there are Oscar rumors for this movie

I think JJ Abrams is staying on as the executive producer, and I’m sure he’s mapped out a general direction of how he wants the other movies to go, so that’s why I credit him for getting this one done before moving on to others. There’s no way Disney would give 3 different people with 3 different visions control of a trilogy and have 3 unconnected stories jumbled together. He’s probably playing the Kevin Feige role for the Marvel Cinematic Universe and bridging all of the ideas together into one coherent story line.

There’s one big, major gripe I have that I haven’t see anyone else have. Its more of a personal pet peeve I have with the whole franchise actually. I really don’t like it, and I don’t buy it, when people go around saying the Jedi and the force are some mythical religion. In the original series, that guy who got force choked by Vader called it an ancient religion. Here, Daisy acts surprised when Han told her all of the rebellion and fighting was real. People! Its been like 20-30 years! There are probably remnants of the Jedi and the force in millions of books still around! The guys who served with Vader probably saw with their own eyes Jedis in their lifetime. There are probably decrees by the Emperor that any force-sensitive people are to be killed on sight, any remaining Jedi’s hunted down, found lightsabers turned into the official Galactic Empire lightsaber registry! And Daisy, while young, lived in a time where the Galactic Empire was within living memory. She lives in a downed AT-AT for god sakes, where did she think that came from?? The gulf war was about 20 years ago, you don’t see 20 year old kids now saying that the war was a myth and speaking of the legends of General Schwarzkopf, some mythical figure that doesn’t exist anymore. Even if the Empire killed all of the Jedi and destroyed their temple, there are aliens, apparently like Maz, who lives for a thousand years who can say “Oh yeah, the Jedi? They were a bunch of force-using Republic policemen who went around cutting people’s hands off with lightsabers. Of course they were real, here’s a TV show produced by the Empire about their last days, here’s a picture of one posing with me, here’s a toy lightsaber”

637

Hey, I think my old buddies are coming on board! LET’S GAS THE FUCKERS!

638

I think he’s ok with killing those who are trying to kill him. He just wasn’t cool with gunning down a group of people that posed no real threat. He wanted to break free from evil, not from killing.

How many Jedis were there in the whole galaxy? I seriously doubt that everyone alive at the time had seen them or was even all that aware of what, exactly, they were. Or what the force was.

639

No, that’s Kathleen Kennedy. Abrams’ name does not appear anywhere in the (currently very short) list of credits for Episode IX.

640

I thought about mentioning that, but it’s ambiguous, as you say, and in any event, Luke wasn’t there to see it.