But they were important - they were important to Rey. All this time we thought we were getting mythology, but instead we were getting character development.
Plus, Kylo telling her “Your parents were nobody. You’re nobody. But not to me.” was, on some weird level, the most romantic scene I’ve seen all year.
Her parents may be nobody, but in no way can Rae herself be described as nobody. She has force potential to match Ren and he’s supposed to be top banana in terms of force power.
The misspelling of names in this thread is driving me bananas.
Rey
Poe
Kylo
Finn
Leia
Rose
Snoke
Hux
DJ
Luke
Holdo
I think you mean “Hugs”. General Hugs? With an H?
HA! That scene set the pace for the film right away. 
I’d say it ties into the general theme that wars aren’t won or lost by Big Damn Heroes with important destinies and that not everyone has to be special to make a difference. Before Luke was the son of Vader, he was just a farmhand from a backwoods planet. Finn isn’t anyone special - just a Stormtrooper who made a choice. Rose is a tech worker who’d probably have died with the fleet if she hadn’t gotten a chance to make a difference. Rey isn’t some lost relative of someone important - just an orphan girl who had an opportunity to do something that matters.
You don’t have to Be Somebody; you just have to Do Something.
Which is summed up with the slave boy at the end. I might have missed it, but did he use the force to get the broom to fly over to him?
Awesome movie.
I have to say I’m surprised by the near-universal acclaim here. My feelings were decidedly more mixed. 
I’ll be seeing it again on Sunday with my family, so maybe a re-watch without my expectations clashing with the movie will let me see it differently. But at first viewing, I liked it substantially less than TFA. I do like that story-wise, they tried something different, and that it wasn’t TESB re-tread. But if feel like it really could have used one more editing pass, at the script phase. A few lines here or there could have really cleaned some things up.
Problems I had:
OK, I think I got most of it off my chest. There was a lot to like in there too, but most of it’s been covered. For the record, I do like: Rey’s parentage reveal, Luke’s ending, Leia finally using the Force, Rose, the message that it’s not all about the Chosen One doing big flashy things and blowing stuff up, the Porgs (Bad Chewie! don’t eat them!), some of the visuals (though I would argue that TFA and Rogue One have TLJ beat there), most of the banter (though some felt misplaced, it was better than than the dearth of humor in most of the Prequels).
I’m pretty sure that saber had a different (red?) hilt. Luke would have known that Rey had his old saber, so he wouldn’t have duplicated it, lest it give away the illusion. (For all he knew, she could have been right there next to him with it.) Would have been nice to see the green one, but it seems that one got lost/destroyed during the flashback battle. The last time we see it, I think, is when Ben force-pushes Luke into the rubble.
I thought I saw that too. It flew to his hand.
Saw it last night at a midnight showing, first time I’ve done that but man that’s the way to see Star Wars! A huge room full of fans clapping and cheering at everything!
I loved it! I had read and seen *nothing *about the film going in and I was surprised that I was legitimately *surprised *by lots of it and did not see things coming! Luke’s ruse at the end totally had me fooled even though I noticed the focus on Kylo Ren’s red footprints immediately, I did not catch the reasoning behind it!
I really thought when Leia was blasted into space that that was her death scene, so again was surprised when she survived! I guess that was to show she could use the Force as well to pull her back?
I loved the porgs, I want one!
Another few things I didn’t like:
-There were at least three major sequences where all hands were on deck, and if we don’t win this battle right now, the Rebellion is crushed. That’s like 2 too many. By the time we were on Hoth II for the really final battle of the movie I mean it, I had used up my suspension of disbelief for the movie all ready. How can the First Order be so shitty at its job, and yet have apparently the massive power that it does? I was rooting for them to win there at the end, because their time has got to have come, right? It’s almost comical how often the floor gets mopped with the blood of First Order failures in this movie.
-The opening battle was pretty cool. But the speed of those bombers? Really? They were moving at bicycle speed. Through space.
-The “badder the baddie, the bigger the spaceship” thing is getting ridiculous. Star Destroyers? Huge! Super Star Destroyers? Even huger. Resurgent Star Destroyers? Even bigger and badder (this was, I think, the class of ship that fired the big guns on the Rebel base at the beginning of the film). But think that’s big? The Mega Star Destroyer is, aparently, 60 kilometers wide! But, fear not; all of these ships are all basically equally invincible and equally vulnerable.
Just like all these asteroid/moon/planet mega weapons. Just gotta find the one spot where Smaug’s got a missing scale, and the whole thing goes kablooie. Over and over again.
-Way too much exposition dialogue. And “here’s the moral of the story” dialogue. Case in point. When Kylo Ren tells Rey that her parents were nobodys. I can’t quote it, but it’s basically, “They were nobody.” (ok, cool!) Just like you’re a nobody! (right, thanks for drawing the line for me there) Therefore, you should want to join me, because everyone else abandoned you and thinks you’re worthless, but not me! (oooh, really? I didn’t get the point, thanks for clarifying :rolleyes:)." It does not make for good/realistic dialogue, nor for good movie-watching.
Or, the what felt like endless dialogue variations on “hey, the people have the power!” “We don’t need legends, we need every day people taking action right now!” Which, I mean, is an awesome part of the story and part of the Star Wars, um, cannon of themes? It’s why we love Luke. And Han. They’re just these guys, you know. Just like Rey and Finn and Rose. But just show it. I don’t need the characters to repeat loudly and frequently “we are the people! We have the power!” Just be it. The movie shows it quite well, the characters can take a break from interpreting the movie for me if they want to.
Also, my least favorite scene:
Luke “I’mma burn down the library! RAARRR!”
Luke, 3 seconds later, “Nah, guess not.”
Yoda, “Lemme burn that for you!”
Luke, “BUT THE BOOKS!”
Yoda, “You don’t even know how to read, chill bro. Get her wisdom from the streets, she will.”
Luke, “You’re so wise. Why did I ever doubt you?”
Yoda, thumbs up to the camera!
Man, after waking up and thinking on it more, the less I liked this movie. Or rather, I liked it a lot, but the writing/dialogue is really inconsistent throughout, and the pacing/plot is too jumbled.
I’m not really clear on why Laura Dern led the First Order on the six-hour OJ-in-his-white-Bronco impulse-speed chase rather than just jumping straight to the destination: Crait. She lost all but one of the rebellion’s ships by dragging out the chase.
Yoda said something along “those books have nothing that Rey does not already possess” and a later scene briefly showed that she had the books aboard Millenium Falcon so burning down the empty library was of no consequence.
Worse than that, I thought, was when he said something like, “you’re not part of this story.” A little too 4th wall winky-winky for me.
I think I’ve got this one. The point was for everyone else to sneak off the main ship under cloak and land on Crait, without the First Order noticing, while the now-empty main ship continued onwards as a decoy until they blew it up and went home. If they jumped straight to Crait, it would have been obvious, and therefore pointless. Without DJ’s betrayal of the cloaked ships, it was actually a decent enough plan.
This is where I’m confused. What’s the difference between traveling to Crait under impulse power vs. hyperdrive with regards to revealing their intention? Why was it less obvious under impulse power?
Front and center, I’ll say that the things I liked far outweighed the things that bugged, and while it’s still, for my money, not as good nor as tightly constructed as ROGUE ONE, it’s significantly better than FORCE AWAKENS.
FA’s best aspect was that it introduced engaging new characters (w/one major exception) while still doing justice to the old ones, but the storytelling was woefully derivative. This time, the characters are back (and the one terrible one–Hux–far less annoying) and the plotting is smart, unpredictable, and gutsy. That makes for a superior experience overall, even though there’s still a bit of bloat.
The irritations–not necessarily minor, per se, but not dealbreakers either:
Really loved the surprise demise of Snoke and his design in “person” was better than I expected, but that does mean that he was just another Darth Maul (on a grander scale), there to play the heavy without any insight into how he became the Supreme Leader or how he mastered the Force in the first place.
FORCE AWAKENS’s environments never felt like all the terrible Ep 1-3 CG/green screen landscapes, but the Monte Carlo-like casino world here did. The fact that this was a plot tangent that proved genuinely gratuitous and unnecessary didn’t help. The best thing about it was the opportunity it gave to meet Rose, which could’ve been done countless of other ways.
Kids. Star Wars may ostensibly be made for kids, but it’s always been terrible at depicting them. They weren’t in the original trilogy but the less said about the Jake Lloyd posse and the awful younglings, the better. FA didn’t have any but here, their intrusion may be minor, but still sappy and ham-fisted, especially that last regrettable shot. This also helps make Planet Reno Vegas a fizzle.
Leia pulls a Spock. I know she’s got the Force in her blood (though never trained), but pulling off that Space Ice Capade struck me as really absurd and something even a Jedi Master would have a hard time pulling off. But she’s up and about almost instantly after that. Luke was stronger in the Force and took more time recovering from a Yeti kiss.
So while I wouldn’t call those nitpicks, the weight of things that worked for me unexpectedly–the Rey/Kylo conversations, Luke’s darkness and Yoda’s cameo, the throne room twist & battle, the salt crystal planet details, BB8’s disguise and the multi-porgs, Laura Dern (silly dress notwithstanding)–more than made up for it.
Now, they still have got their work cut out for them for Ep9. Luke’s dead, but so is Leia (for all practical purposes). The final Kylo vs. Rey conflict will be a doozy, but the Rebels are so winnowed down to nothing, they really have their work cut out for them in wiping out the First Order in one more film. I don’t envy them that, and am guessing (because Johnson is the best director of this third trilogy) that this will be the peak of the final 3. We’ll see.
Final Assessment: Ep 5 > 4 > 3.5 (R1) > 8 > 6 > 7 > 3 > 1 > 2.
Once Finn and Rose were captured and the plan revealed, nothing. But they had some kind of cloaking device techno something something that was keeping the shuttles hidden. The secret was blown by the codebreaker guy, so the cloak was removed (I admit to not quite catching the details of how that happened).
I don’t think that those escape shuttles even had hyperdrive to begin with.
The cruiser turning around and speeding up was gorgeous.
I’m surprised no one is second guessing Kylo’s explanation of Rey’s parents. Everyone is just going to take his word for it? No one thinks it was a ruse of “Look, your parents were nobodys. Nobody cares about you. But I care about you, come join me.”
They already did it with the original Star Wars. Where’s your father Luke? Uh, he was killed by Darth Vader see.