One note: Abrams sure likes making his heroes run doesn’t he? Ironically Solo DOESN’T do a Kirk and go “AHHHHHHHHHHIEEEEE” while he runs. Ironic because there is precedence for Solo doing that.
I’m late to seeing the movie, having put it off until I was free of a cold and everyone was gathered to go see it, so am I late too to talk about Captain Phasma?
I seemed to remember all sort of talk before the film premiered about the character, how this high ranking officer was a woman and didn’t need fancy armour to show off her boobs and all that.
Then all we get to see is the Captain reprimanding a trooper and then turning up again to be dumped in a trash compactor. I’d like even just to know if that was a joke or do we need to wait for her to turn up as a surprise in the sequel?
Captain Phasma will be in episode 8, and " is an important character, a baddie in the best sense of the word" - Kathleen Kennedy
Brian
It will pass Avatar next week to be the highest grossing movie in the US.
Internationally, we will have to see. It does open in China on the 9th.
No, it wasn’t.
The backlash is so banal and predictable. No Star Wars movie, no matter how good, will manage to avoid facing something similar. The overwhelming majority opinion is that Force Awakens is much, much better than the prequels. That some people can’t accept this is just a bit sad.
[QUOTE=Knorf]
The backlash is so banal and predictable. No Star Wars movie, no matter how good, will manage to avoid facing something similar. The overwhelming majority opinion is that Force Awakens is much, much better than the prequels. That some people can’t accept this is just a bit sad.
[/QUOTE]
Come now; you guys are arguing opinion. I agree with you that the movie was very good and better than the prequels, but I’ll preface that with “I think” or “I believe.”
No they arn’t.
Just making a random Python joke while anyone still gets them…
Rule #1 of Sci-Fi: Cardio.
[QUOTE=Adm. Akbar]
IT’S A TARP!
[/QUOTE]
Sorry, someone had to…
Next week? I think it will probably beat Avatar, but not a chance that it will happen by next week. It’s at $1.39B currently, which means it needs to make almost $1.4B more to pass Avatar - i.e., it needs to double its current take.
ETA: OK, just realized you are talking about the domestic box office. Yeah, you’re probably right. I was looking at worldwide.
Once again, it’s not as simple as either of you are saying–because “the prequels” are not an undifferentiated mass any more than “the original trilogy” was. The new movie is better than the first two prequels, but not as good as Revenge of the Sith.
So no one can possibly be having an honest reaction if they sat in the theatre and were less than blown away? :rolleyes:
And if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does.
He’s since apologized for his earlier remarks, particularly the “white slaver” analogy.
There’s a wide gulf between “less than blown away” and the aforementioned banal and predictable backlash.
Entertainment is subjective, so it’s unreasonable to expect everyone to enjoy a movie.
On the other hand, it’s perfectly reasonable to expect that a movie like this will have its fair share of fashionably outraged “fans” who for some reason expected that this movie would be a **literal **messiah which would usher in peace and love for all men through its divine cinematic perfection.
As near I can tell, there are a few totally simple demands that were not met on that count.
- The movie must perfectly encapsulate the tone and feel of classic movies.
- The movie must break entirely new ground, preferably by inventing several new tropes that have never before been seen in media. There must be no references to the original movie since those would be lazy callbacks, but don’t forget rule #1 either.
- The movie must respect all canon. Even the parts of the canon that have been thrown out. But not the bad parts of the canon. You know which ones I’m talking about. Also, don’t actually reference the canon, per rule #2.
Simple, right? If only JJ Abrams weren’t such a tool. They should have kept George Lucas on. At least he knows how to respect source material. Right? Hello? Anyone?
So I’ve got no chance in hell to ever catch up with this thread, having only seen the movie two weeks after its release, but I’ll just jump in at the deep end…
One repeated criticism is it’s derivative nature of the originals, and I found that grating at first, too. But one point of Star Wars is precisely that you’re shaped by more than circumstance, there’s something bigger (a kind of invisible force, one might say) at work; thus, the basically same setting repeats, but with (presumably) a different outcome, as it did with Vader and Luke.
I don’t think that justifies all of the rehashing, but it does make it easier for me to live with it (no doubt because I liked the movie overall, and didn’t find the Abrams-isms as grating as in the Star Trek reboot). In particular, a bit more originality than ‘Death Star 3—bigger, badder, destroyed even faster’ would have been appreciated; additionally, the five (or whatever) planets being destroyed carried zero emotional impact.
The one Abramsian flaw that I find it hard to come to terms with is his utter lack of understanding of how a sci-fi universe (even one as loosely sci-fi as SW) works. Both in Trek, and now here, the scale is completely confused, and thus, important narrative constraints are simply ignored. The problem is worse in Trek, where it practically destroys the whole framework, than here, where we just have the annoyances of a weapon firing from one star system to another, something apparently seen in yet a third star system instantly.
Luckily, since that whole thing didn’t do much to advance the plot, its not working also doesn’t do terribly much damage; but I must admit to be somewhat relieved that JJ isn’t at the helm for the next installment.
What I do think this movie did brilliantly, however, was to capture the feel of Star Wars—the lived-in universe, grimey, run down in places, but also filled with awe and wonder. That’s something that was lost in the prequel’s slick CGI and silly comic-relief robot soldiers.
Overall, I thought it was very solid and enjoyable, and if the following movies manage to built on this into a distinctive and new direction, rather than featuring yet more re-hash, I think this could be the start of a worthy sequel saga to the original.
Hey, now, those rolling tentacle monsters were pretty original. And terrible.
Agreed about the lack of impact. Next time we’ll get the star-sized sphere that can blow up a HUNDRED planets…
…point taken.
I liked the rolling tentacle monsters. I just didn’t buy that Finn was the only person they grabbed who was not immediately killed.