The Battle of Hoth is about 3 years after the Battle of Yavin. He may not have an formal ‘training’, but I’m guessing Luke didn’t just go… cool, I can do stuff with the Force and maybe I should wait to try again until I really need it ;).
Saw it this morning. More than completely makes up for the prequels. Only complaints are some parts felt “rushed,” like how Rey and Finn jump into the Falcon and figure out how to fly and operate it in a few minutes, but it didn’t detract from my enjoyment.
Saw it Sunday with my 13- and 9-year-old nephews. A good time was had by all.
There were definitely flaws, but nothing too unforgivable (except for maybe Starkiller Base. Another planet-destroying weapon!?). I thought Adam Driver’s emo/whiny villain was much better-realized than emo/whiny Anakin Skywalker in the prequels. I like the way Han and Leia aged into their new roles in the larger story.
Three things I haven’t seen mentioned yet:
[ol]
[li]I thought Chewbacca was much more fleshed out as a character in this one than in previous films. It was the first time he really acted like Han’s friend and partner, not just a sidekick. Plus, they clearly have someone else in the suit; Chewie looked much more athletic than previous incarnations (I’m assuming they let Peter Mayhew do some of the standing-around shots so he could get the credit at the end of the film).[/li][li]Where was Wedge?! Why wasn’t Admiral Antilles one of the characters planning the assault on Starkiller Base?[/li][li]With all of the homages/call-backs to Ep. IV, I would have liked for the final scene to be a big State funeral for Han (evocative of the award ceremony). I think we would have been better served cutting the scene of the tentacled monsters running around Han’s ship and using the time on the back end to collectively mourn General Solo along with the characters in the movie.[/li][/ol]
You can either be right or be happy.
All he wanted was a Pepsi AND THEY WOULDN’T GIVE IT TO HIM!
It turns out she’s the illicit love child of Yoda and a tangerine.
IMDB lists someone named “Joonas Suotamo” as Maynard’s stunt double. It’s the only credit he has listed. Google tells me he’s Finnish and played basketball at Penn State.
Yeah, this. There’s a pretty clear line between gunning down defenseless villagers and blasting your way out of a stronghold because it’s that or you and the guy you’re helping probably get killed for nothing. For one thing, the Storm Troopers were shooting at him too.
The fact that they all wear body-and-face concealing body armor probably does much to help too. Kind of the downside to intentionally dehumanizing uniform design. It can be intimidating, or it can remove much of the emotional baggage of shooting the guy.
Am I the only one who thought Kylo Ren’s voice, in mask, sounded like Anton Chigur?
Chewie’s action stand-in was Ian Whyte, who was one of the Gregor Cleganes in Game of Thrones.
And Denis Lawson declined to return to Star Wars because he’s a prat.
That article is from a year ago, and is only speculation. Chewie was credited in Force Awakens as Joonas Suotamo, a Finnish basketball player. He likely did most of the scenes in which Chewie is moving around, but they don’t want to reveal the details of who did which scenes as they want people to view him as one character.
I thought it was the best Star Wars film so far. I’m sure that my estimation will shift once I’ve had three decades to pick at flaws the way I have with the original films, but I do have a number of complaints already. But these are mostly the kind that are nerdy fun to hash out. Among the complaints I don’t have:
- People who liked the movie are blinded by nostalgia
- People who hated the movie are blinded by nostalgia
- They copied the plot of A New Hope
On the third point, the fact that the plot was close to A New Hope was one of the few spoilers I went into the movie with, nor did I disapprove. So I was able to delight in how they varied the old material rather than being outraged where they didn’t. I have also recently watched the original trilogy, and the flaws in those films stung me more deeply than these fresh sins. It was such a relief to be dealing with good repartee among characters instead of most banter being driven by people reacting to Han Solo being dickish for no reason. And nobody said anything as cringeworthy as using “laser brain” as a term of abuse (I am reminded of an old MST3K bit in which they lampooned a movie for using ‘space’ as a generic modifier to make mundane things seem more science-fictiony).
A lot of things that I forgave the film for had to do with my assumption that as the title suggests, The Force was awakening, still mysterious but now clearly numinous, moving actors and events. The surge in The Force is mentioned only once as I recall, but it hangs over everything that happens. Rey’s Force sensitivity is awakened. I actually thought we were supposed to understand that Fin was force-sensitive, though to a lesser degree, and that was awakening. I kept expecting they’d show some other evidence that the Force-sensitive people across the galaxy were beginning to experience new awareness, because if that’s not the kind of thing that’s happening, why the title? I take them at their word. This is about The Force awakening.
Failure to make this explicit leaves them on the hook for throwing together a lot of coincidences which could have seemed like ominous convergences with a bit more dialogue on the subject. Rey had to board the Falcon so the Falcon could lead Han to her so Han who would lead her Maz so Rey could find Anakin’s sword so she could confront Kylo Ren who would recognize and be defeated by it. Meanwhile, Han had to meet Rey so Rey and Fin who would lead him back to The Resistance so that Han would join the fight on the Starkiller because Kylo Ren had to meet him and kill him in order to complete his journey to the dark side. Fin had to be on the janitorial staff before his first villiager-slaughtering patrol because he had to have knowledge of the station works because he had to rescue Poe and meet Rey because he had to pass his observations about the workings of the station to The Resistance.
A couple of coincidences at critical junctures is probably lazy writing. Not always, though. A string of otherwise unrelated coincidences that shows the hand of God at work in the Blues Brothers climaxes hilariously in the car finally falling apart when it no longer had a destiny ahead; and that worked because they made it very clear that God was part of the premise of the movie. An interwoven web of coincidences, whether you like how they played out or not, fits very neatly in a world in which a galaxy-spanning numinous presence is central to the premise, and writing such a thing is not lazy, it’s actually pretty hard. And is of course almost certain to be vulnerable to analysis.
I wanted to know more about Fin, because moments in the film where he is clearly shown to have knowledge that you wouldn’t expect from a blaster-jock make me think that he’s a guy who while filling his mook duties quietly observed and thought about things. He had surprising knowledge, but a very limited sphere of know-how. I would really like to see him developed as a guy who thinks about things. Perhaps his daydreaming was the reason he was stuck in janitorial duties, but it gave him a chance to observe and ponder all the more.
As for Rey, it seemed to me that the first time the bad guys talked about The Girl it was freighted with unspoken significance, and so I read that into all other mentions of her. That she might be either Luke’s or Leia’s daughter was really too easy a guess for them to be so persistently coy about saying who she was. Then again, I understand that at the end of five years of Lost the answer turned out to be exactly what they said it definitely wasn’t in the first season. So… you know. Maybe you don’t trust Abrahms so much with the surprises.
What people forget is that Finn not only wanted to stop being a generic stormtrooper, but that he actively hated and feared the First Order in particular. He considered them evil as fuck and wanted to get far far away from them, so is it any real surprise that when cornered by them he wouldn’t hesitate in fighting back?
Its one thing to leave your army buddies, quite another to run away from the space nazis. Do you think a deserter from the Waffen SS would have played nice when they tracked him down to execute him?
An idle thought regarding Finn being assigned to Sanitation, and I can’t remember if it got touched on in here:
It actually makes sense that he’d know a bit about how the base was laid out and how it worked given that assignment. If he was responsible for emptying all the dustbins and throwing the contents into the garbage compactors, he’s probably been all over the place, and gotten into relatively sensitive areas. He might not know how to use the shield generator controls, but he at least knows where they are.
Fin’s first scene is him being horrified at his fellow stormtrooper dying. He didn’t seem to view his companion as an evil monster deserving death.
And that storm trooper wasn’t shooting at him either.
So are the stormtroopers exclusively used by the Galactic Empire under Palpatine and the First Order, or did they serve under the Old Republic and whatever replaced the Empire?
But he did consider them something more than faceless monsters. And they were less shooting “at him” than at the piece of military hardware he was attempting to steal. It’s not like they were hunting him for sport when he started killing them.
I’ll agree that the Finn comfortably shooting his former comrades during the escape didn’t fit. This could have been fixed pretty easily with better writing, in my opinion (pretend my dialogue is much less clunky):
POE: We’re hit! The armor can’t take many more hits like that!
[Finn continues firing, but deliberately avoids shooting to kill]
POE: If they get that emplacement by the power cells set up, we’re as good as dead.
FINN: I can’t! Some of those guys are my friends!
[Poe reaches back and puts a hand on Finn’s shoulder]
POE: I know. But you gotta pick a side, friend. If they capture us, they’re not going to be your friends any more. I know you’ve seen it before.
[Finn smashes his fist on the panel, screams in frustration, and shoots the emplacement, blowing up several troopers]
POE: Attaboy! We’re almost free of the tether!
Or similar.
I really enjoyed the movie, by the way, but there were some little things like this that could have been improved pretty easily, in my view.