In a period of a few days, she’s escaped a stormtrooper raid, outfought two TIE fighters in a garbage starship, outrun a planetary blockade, gotten in touch with his father, and joined the Resistance. * That’s * the “so much” Kylo has heard about her. I didn’t see any indication that he’d heard of her before or had any reason to think she was special or Force-sensitive - if anything, he reacts with surprise when she first resists his attempt to read her mind.
It’s the Star Wars universe. This is just the sort of performance you expect to see random people demonstrate from time to time, like Wedge Antilles, Boba Fett, or Han Solo.
Anyone disappointed with the score of the film?
I remembering thinking it could have been better, than two of my friends brought it up, (individually,) both saying the score could have been better. Both are musicians, so… Is it just us? I wasn’t aware it was the same composer until they told me.
“You’re wrong, Leia. You have that power too. In time you’ll learn to use it as I have. The Force is strong in my family. My father has it. I have it and… My sister has it.”
I enjoyed it, though it was a little too callback-y for me. I think that could have been toned down some to tell a fresher story, though it did the right thing in both reawakening the fandom of people who know the original and giving new viewers a starting point that is quite similar to the original.
I definitely saw lens flare at least once.
I had the same questions as Deeg, plot-wise. Why Rey and Leia? Why Rey and Luke? But lots of films fall into that weird trap of forgetting who knows whom, as if the filmmakers are so familiar with a character they assume everyone else must be.
I also thought it was a bit off for Fin to leap right into killing other storm troopers once he was established as someone who actually cares about people’s lives and doing the right thing.
I was not incredibly amped to see it, but I’ll be much more enthused about the second one, I think. I thought Rey and Fin were both charming, and BB8’s Wall-E cuteness was great.
Would one of you be so kind as to overcome my ignorance as to why so many of you are reporting seeing lense flare?
I was 90% sure Han Solo was going to die when he went on the catwalk, but I did wonder if it was going to turn out that he had to kill his son for the greater good. As a father myself, that would have struck me as even more painful for Han than dying.
Yup. It wasn’t as good as the original score. They could have just re-used the original and I would have been happier.
JJ Abrams has a love-love relationship with lens flare. The Star Trek films are prime examples.
The Empire/First Order need to get a bit more creative then their patented “lets just throw Death Stars at the problem until it goes away”. The might think also of providing better escort vessels for their planet killing machines and armour the explody bits; did they have Jackie Fisher design all their vessels?
In fairness, they did armor it this time. The X-Wings were ineffective until someone snuck in and blew a hole in it from the inside.
Rey having Luke and Anakin’s old lightsaber is cool and all, but Rey was pretty handy with that staff and wouldn’t it be awesome to see her wield a double-bladed lightsaber in the next one? When I played KOTOR, I always liked using those because they look so damn cool. (and are pretty effective if you’ve put points into that skill)
I’ve only read the first several pages of this thread, so forgive me if this has already been covered:
I wonder if we’re all thinking of the same scene? I noticed a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it shot with a woman who I took to be Hannah John-Kamen, from the new Syfy show Killjoys. Another poster mentioned seeing her, too. The movie is listed on her IMDB page, though you’re right that IMDB often has erroneous listings for bit parts–especially in new movies.
Yes. The score seemed a bit flat to me.
I had the same reaction. Williams phoned it in. I’ve listened to the soundtrack album a few times on Spotify, and although it’s a solid, competent score, it doesn’t have any memorable, striking new themes or big orchestral showpieces. Still, I think it’s probably better than anything Abrams’s usual guy, Michael Giacchino, would have come up with.
In all honesty, is it possible to equal or best the original soundtrack?
To be fair, no. But even TPM had Duel of the Fates, despite it being the exclamation point on an otherwise meaningless interpretive dance performance. I was really looking for the Imperial March somewhere during SW7, but I don’t think it came up.
On only one viewing, I vaguely remember Leia’s Theme being played, even when Princess/General Leia wasn’t in the scene (I could be wrong here though).
It was briefly invoked when Kylo was looking at the charred remains of Vader’s helmet.
Damn, if you can take credit for having invented this emoticon, I must salute you.
I’m glad that I’m apparently not the only one who things the game Knights of the Old Republic ought to be considered cannon. It certainly kept my interest in Star Wars up the way the prequels definitely couldn’t. But the explanation for how The Force works, presumably drawn from the EU materials, is somewhat contradicted by the new films. That is, that everyone who is Force Sensitive feels themselves drawn to The Dark Side, and besides combat and magic training, a lot of Jedi training is learning to resist negative emotions, or even strong positive emotions that tend to be yoked to their opposites.
This makes sense of the previous movies, and echoes traditions like Buddhism, Zen or other such practices in which it is held that the cause of suffering is desire, including the desire not to suffer. But Ren’s struggle in the new movie is stated as him being drawn to The Light Side. I can explain it away, I suppose. Is there a metric for how far you can go before it becomes a fan wank? People who care about someone who have gone over to The Dark Side usually believe they still retain some goodness, and this has proven true at least once in the overarcing story. Sooo… yeah The Dark Side constantly tugs at you, but some goodness stubbornly remains. In the case of Kylo Ren, he’s convinced that a little scrap of goodness in him is the reason he sucks. And he does suck. But he killed Han Solo in a desperate bid to stop sucking, and surely the next movie will have him turn up as an actual badass worthy of his costume, thus verifying that a morsel of conscience actually significantly nerfs a dark Jedi. But then the question will remain: why didn’t Vader suck? He nursed creditable paternal love, and he was badass.
My wife and I saw it this morning. We really liked it. Our main complaint would be the excessive re-use of plot points from Episode IV, but I really don’t see that as a bad thing here. This movie had two main jobs: wash away the bad taste of the prequels, and establish the new movies as a sequel to the original trilogy. The near scene-for-scene copying of the first movie may have been a bit heavy-handed, but it did get the job done, and there was enough original enjoyment in there for me. It was also interesting to see how they had almost literal passing-the-torch scenes between the stars of the original trilogy and the new stars of this one - I was half expecting to see Han Solo hand the keys to the Falcon over to Rey at some point - but again I don’t really mind that, they were trying very hard to associate this movie with the original trilogy rather than the prequels.
One thing I also appreciated is that there weren’t any scenes that felt like they were present purely to sell a toy. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure there are and will be many, many toys based on this movie, but unlike the prequel trilogy there weren’t any action sequences that felt like their only reason for being in the movie was to push a new toy or video game.
I managed to go into the movie almost entirely unspoiled. I had guessed before seeing it that Kylo Ren was Luke’s son - I was wrong on that, but not completely off the mark. Though spoilers didn’t seem to matter as much as I expected, the entire second half of the movie was terribly predictable, but I enjoyed it anyway.
Vader spent the entire time between the end of Episode III and somewhere between Episode IV and Episode V believing that he had killed his wife and his unborn children. He was emotionally dead because he believed there was nothing left to connect him to his old life, and when he discovered that his children were alive, it set in motion the events that lead to his redemption.
Kylo Ren is presumably aware of this. It’s likely that he believes that killing his father will likewise kill the part of himself that is drawn toward the light.
Of course, the “hole” in the armor is something that almost anybody in the galaxy could take advantage of since apparently every ship larger than a toaster has hyperdrive. (And humans have the ability to manually time coming out of it to within a few miles (inside the shields but not inside the planet)).
Seems to me the much less risky plan would be to attach a thousand hyperdrive engines to a thousand small asteroids (if the Empire/First Order can move planets between star systems then I assume the resistance can move large rocks) and then use timers to have them autofly at the ship and come out of light speed while inside the planet.
Not sure what version of physics Star Wars would want to use for that eventually but seems to me only really bad things could result and no Resistance lives are risked and isn’t a plan that relies on randomly crash landing on a planet and then finding everything you need to be within walking distance.