I wonder if that “kill me and turn evil” thing is just a really good bluff for when he’s caught with his lightsaber down?
“Yes, strike me down, Br’er Jedi, and your journey to the Dark Side will be complete!”
“Dan, I’m not a Republic serial villain. Do you seriously think I’d explain my master-stroke if there remained the slightest chance of you affecting its outcome? I did it thirty-five minutes ago.” – Ozymandias
One-Eyed Willy! Goonies never say die!
The knife, like most of the plot, worked out at-best ok in the theater, but the more time that passes, the more the fridge logic gets me and makes me frustrated. So yeah, the movie overall was a good time pew pew experience, but mediocre film-making as art. Not that the other 10 movies were all outstanding, but none of them fell apart completely for me the second the house lights came up.
Also, something that stupidly bugs me is that most human’s looks changed a bit over each of the three trilogies within said trilogies, but because they insisted on really pushing Leia in this movie with footage already filmed of Rey, Rey’s look couldn’t change. I’d have liked to have seen her in something like when Luke shows up in the OT in the black outfit. Something to show on the outside how he changed and grew on the inside. She had to stay physically static because they had to force Leia in. And I do get it and I love Leia maybe the most and Carrie herself the most but it just didn’t work in JJ’s hands in this movie. And Rey, like the others, couldn’t change between TFA and TLJ because it was ten minutes later.
Rey could learn a thing or two from Captain Mal in this regard.
I could be wrong, but I don’t think the scenes with Rey and Leia were necessarily originally about Rey and Leia. They had a bunch of unused footage of Leia in difference scenes with different characters, and scooped her image out of them to drop into wholly new scenes. I don’t think Rey’s costume scenes were at all dictated by her being in scenes with Leia in this film.
I am surprised that they didn’t give her a “Rey, Jedi Knight” outfit, though, if only because that’s one additional action figure they could market.
I was playing a Jedi in a Star Wars RPG once. We captured a Sith Inquisitor, who had been up to some extremely evil stuff. We’d nearly defeated him, and he tried that, “Strike me down with all your anger and your journey to the Dark Side will be complete!” thing on me, so I said. “I enter a meditative state. I control my breathing, slow my heart rate, and release all my emotions.” The GM had me make a roll of some sort to do that, on which I succeeded. “Okay. Now I cut off his head.” Because killing that guy, at that moment, was the rational thing to do, regardless of my emotional state. The guy was objectively a monster, we were outlaws on the run, and we had no way of containing the guy. If we didn’t kill him then, he would absolutely have escaped and killed more people. And, since this was set pre-RotJ, as far as our characters knew, it was literally impossible to come back from the Dark Side.
The GM still gave me a Dark Side point. :mad:
Great shot, kid! That was one in a million!
That’s at least arguably plausible… but if the writers intended that, it would have been trivially easy to actually have someone say so. “Ahh, my grand daughter, you found the clues I left for you so long ago…” or something. As it is, I genuinely don’t think that’s what JJ intended.
Heheh. I, too, quoted Ozymandias as we were walking back home from the theater.
Don’t get cocky, kid.
The problem with the treasure hunt type literary device is that it only works in one direction. The good ones break down when you try to walk them back, the bad ones break down as you’re going through them.
BTW, how was Rey able to hold a transport ship going full throttle and NOT be able to float above the quick-pebble snake trap?
How many times had Destiny and how mysterious the Force is been invoked in the 8 movies before? There’s no need to beat us around the head with it by this point…
Vader said it best : “Don’t underestimate the Force”
She already had a Jedi outfitby the last film. Her outfit changes have just been more subtle, which I’m happy with. “Ooh, I’ve *seen *things, so I wear black now” is the sensibility of a child.
For me, the point isn’t whether it’s possible to come up with some contrived scenario where the treasure hunt knife quest makes sense in the context of the universe. The point is that Abrams didn’t even try, and obviously does not care. There are a hundred ways that a trivial amount of effort could have been expended in order to make things make more sense. Some of them would have made for a less visually arresting scene, and so I’m certain they weren’t even considered.
Abrams is all about filming the moment when Rey holds up the dagger and has the silhouette match the outline of the Death Star wreckage. I’m convinced he started with that image and then put in the minimal amount of effort to make that happen in the movie, giving no real thought to seeing things from an in-world perspective rather than that of the audience.
Same with the trench in the ground made by the crash-landed Falcon, and how it has no effect either before or after.
Same with the brief fight with Rey’s Sith analog and her Swiss Army knife lightsaber.
Same with the entire rescue fleet showing up all at the same moment.
Same with ten thousand star destroyers rising up out of the ocean in unison just to hover around for the next day or so.
Same with the Falcon being on fire having sustained serious damage doing the hyperspace skip walk at the beginning.
Same with that hyperspace thrill park ride through half a dozen densely populated or otherwise hazardous areas within two minutes.
Same with Lando rescuing our heroes in disguise and then whipping off his helmet thirty seconds later.
Same with the cavalry charge across the surface of the star destroyer.
Same with Rey burying the lightsabers at Luke’s old home on Tatooine.
The point isn’t whether it’s possible, with some work, to come up with a fan explanation of any of this. The point is that Abrams isn’t interested in explanations at all. He’s interested in moments, cool visuals, quips instead of dialogue, and frenetic action over contemplation or exposition. That’s what he’s aiming for, and to be completely fair he hits that target more often than he misses it. He’s got a great eye for this stuff!
For some people that’s what they want most out of a Star Wars movie, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Personally I need more than that to enjoy a movie. If all you ultimately have is quips and visuals, then to me that’s like watching a trailer, not a movie. I can enjoy watching a well-made trailer or demo reel a lot, but it’s not going to scratch the same itch I have that’s satisfied by watching a movie with a compelling narrative, which to me means a plot that hangs together and characters with realistic motivations and behavior, and consequences for decisions made.
And what’s ultimately so heartbreaking for me is that this is Star Wars, which has never been high literature, but which does have a unique place in American culture, and that I have the feeling (unsupported, true) that with like 5% more effort this movie could have been made so much better, if only Abrams attached any value to the things that matter the most to me. I’m fully prepared to accept that that’s just my opinion, and Abrams is obviously the one with the movie making experience and the giant pile of money to sleep on.
But for the love of Yoda’s ghost, if you could just have Rey spend five seconds *trying *to levitate out of the quickgravel pit before deciding to take the plunge and go after her friends, then why the hell wouldn’t you?
That’s a great way to put it. I was thinking about Daredevil, and how it had some amazing visual sequences–but these were sprinkled among slower sequences with really interesting dialogue and plot development. At its best, the show’s dialog was even better than the action. And the quiet scenes provided enough contrast to the action scenes that it accentuated their thrills, and they provided enough context that the action made sense.
Abrams doesn’t really believe in those quiet scenes. There are a few of them, sure, but not nearly enough to provide contrast or context. And shorting the quiet moments ends up robbing the awesome moments of their full impact.
So if I’m remembering right, the reason the Falcon crash landed was because the landing gear was busted, right?
However, we’ve seen many times that the Falcon lands vertically (look here at ten seconds for an in-trilogy example). Shouldn’t they have been able to fly in and land vertically, just without landing gear? It would have been goofy, but doable.
That’s a very clear example of how Abrams goes for “cool” over sensible, and prioritizes the visually arresting over the more sensible but boring stuff that stays within the narrative.
It was more important to show a crashed Falcon with a trench stretched out behind it, like it was a crashed airplane or something, than to stick with what we already knew the Falcon could do. I suppose you could fan-wank up a theory that by “landing gear”, Poe & Finn meant “the force-fields that let you land vertically like a helicopter”, but that’s just more of the same half-baked nonsense that we’ve got all the way through.
Plus, presumably if they did have a… ballistic(?) landing, it didn’t damage the Falcon much at all, as we see it in the final fleet scene apparently none the worse for wear.
Hey, I just realized–they never set up a skin-showing Rey figure, like with Slave Leia or Ripped Outfit Amidala.
Excellent point. Props to the sequel trilogy for that, at least.
My point is that I don’t care, either.
Sure, I’ve come up with a scenario here, but I didn’t need to, or feel the lack, when I watched the movie or afterwards until it came up in this thread.
Because it did not matter, or affect my enjoyment in any way.
I’m curious about this, and not trying to win an argument at all; I think we may just be very different in this regard.
For me, I enjoyed the spectacle, but I would have enjoyed it more if the spectacle had been better interwoven with dialogue, with quiet moments, and with visual/verbal/other justification for the spectacle.
It sounds like you’re saying that such interweaving would have had zero effect on your enjoyment. Is that true? Or would it have hurt your enjoyment, by taking some time away from the spectacle? Or would you also have enjoyed it even better with a little more space between the spectacles?
For me the spectacles are secondary. I want a good story first. This was not a good story. The first two Star Wars movies were built on good stories. The spectacles as done in 1977 and 1980 were good enough. Since then there hasn’t been a Star Wars movie with a good story in which the characters behaved in understandable ways. The technological advancements in spectacle haven’t made these movies any better.