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Don't get me wrong with the below: I enjoyed it. It did for me what the first nuTrek movie did; let me watch something in a universe I care deeply about, with a lot of wizardry. And, like that movie, was lacking something that I can't quite put my finger on.
I've been away from a keyboard for the last few days, and want to write up a few things I felt during the movie. These are the things that took me out of it:
1. The stormtrooper armor looks off somehow. Too shiney, maybe?
2. Phasma does nothing except bow to death threats and be bureaucratic. Come on.
3. The only thing Han ever did well, he claims, is to be a smuggler. But, he's shitty at it. He's a fantastic commando. Is he lying to Leia, or to us?
4. How LONG have chewie and Han been together, and just now Han tries out the crossbow?
5. Chewie seemed MUCH more lively than ever before. More feelings and deeper thoughts.
6. The initial TIE fighter escape sequence shows us more about the location of guns on a star destroyer than six movies put together. Given ISD2's have like 50 heavy ion cannons and 72 tie fighters why didn't they launch those?
7. When a stormtrooper escapes with the plans to the
8. Where did the star destroyer go when our heroes finally left
9. Going to hyperspace while parked? Yeah, right.
10. Han was all "Isn't there always a mcguffin? Hey, new Han, where's the mcguffin on this thing?", and new Han was all "the mcguffin is right here, but
11. I didn't care one lick about the X-wing attack on the super death star. I never got emotionally invested in those characters. Oh, what, the fighter pilot is still alive? that's nice, I guess. I'd forgotten he existed, as the REAL PCs were bonding. This seemed like a video game (there's nothing wrong with video games).
12. Perhaps most glaring, I was not emotionally invested in the super death star. Nor the billions of lives silenced. And I should have been.
12a, really, we can see the hyperspace torpedo things from EVERYWHERE AT ONCE?
13. R2, really? Why'd you wake up, buddy? What impetus was there for that? Did you know BB8 had the map, or did you just want a stretch?
Those things interrupted my viewing pleasure. I'm sure there is explanation for them all, and they can all be explained away. The point is not that these are or are not objectively wrong, it is that they struck me DURING THE MOVIE as weird and brought me out of the fiction.
I agree with some of these (some don't bother me at all), but I think they largely consist of quibbles. Except for maybe R2.
ReplyDeleteI think I break out of fiction easier than most. I nearly walked out of the second NuTrek movie when the Enterprise was under water, because protecting against the lack of pressure in space and protecting against the pressure of hundreds of feet of salt water are diametrically opposed engineering problems.
ReplyDeleteI'll quibble about Chewy somehow discovering leave-in conditioner in between the OT and TFA. His hair is perfect! It's distracting.
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ReplyDeleteI noticed a lot of these things too, but I've seen enough J.J. Abrams stuff to know that the guy's stories are about compelling and likable characters wandering through incoherent coincidence-driven stories. Everything about the plot and the setting are arranged to drive sympathy towards or away from the characters. So I had my expectations calibrated that way. :) But I can certainly see why these things would jam up your enjoyment of the film.
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R2D2 was on the job, as usual. She was reconstructing the galactic map from the Imperial database; the one the imperials mentioned that they took and wiped. This is why it is missing the same piece in both instances.
As astronavigation and recovering encrypted /corrupted / deleted files is difficult he shut down to divert all his resource to the job. Unfortunately, they never do hacking scenes in Star Wars.
Yes, it was convenient timing, as happens in Star Wars often; I also agree that it would have been nice if they mentioned it to us in basic; not everyone understand binary. ;)
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Also, I found it offputting how offhandedly/casually the senate planets were destroyed. I can't even remember their names. They're treated with the same gravitas as the Emperor disbanding the Senate in Star Wars. We don't know anyone from those planets, we never visit them in the course of the film.
I can see why this choice was made -- all the Kylo Ren redemption stuff loses power if you really dwell on how he's complicit in a gigadeath atrocity and we don't want that distracting from his arc.
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As for R2, I figured it was just a dead message drop, waiting for Rey to show up with the other half of the treasure map. Which is a shitty thing to do to your droid pal but whatever.
I'm right there with you, buddy. I liked the heroic characters and was impressed with Adam Driver as the villainous Kylo Ren, and there were some moments of powerful character interaction along with the technical virtuosity. But on the whole the movie struck me as a skein of fan service and sloppy storytelling stretched over the plot of the original Star Wars, just bigger. The best part for me is that now my daughter is interested in seeing "Episode IV."
ReplyDeleteOh, and there was too much exposition. The movie was too long, also.
ReplyDeleteMy big issue, which I'll rant about at length is how two main characters (even if one was quite powerful in the force) managed to wield the light saber with NO training!
ReplyDeleteWhy should using a sword require training?
ReplyDeleteI'd enjoy reading that rant, Vincent Salzillo. Feel free to plus me in, especially as I never got why light sabers would require extensive training.
ReplyDeleteI mean, training to not kill yourself? Sure. Training to use it like a club? Meh.
ReplyDeleteSo here's the deal: Rey was probably a Padawan, and storm troopers are trained in that anti-light-saber weapon (apparently there's a canon book that shows Finn doing this), so problem solved. :)
ReplyDeleteYou'd need training to hit someone who is also using a sword. Unless the other guy's a complete novice, you're likely to get your feet and hands chopped, right?
ReplyDeleteBut the stormtroopers and Rey both had training
ReplyDeleteChristopher Wargo Rey carries that staff with her constantly which likely means she used it to protect herself on Jukku. Likewise, Finn was train like the other storm trooper we see him fight.
ReplyDeleteYeah, there's the staff too. Plus the Force taking over. She's not good with the sword until she gives into the Force.
ReplyDelete... wait wait. Is there no relevant difference between fighting with a big stick and a lightsaber?
ReplyDeleteWilliam Nichols of course it is, but every martial art shares moves. Many staff moves are similar to sword moves. The insightful (force sensitive are very insightful) can see these similarities and use them.
ReplyDeleteWilliam Nichols of course there is. There are relevant differences between fighting with a sword vs another kind of sword, even. Like, arming sword vs longsword is different than two rapiers.
ReplyDeleteI'm satisfied with the force taking over and doing the work for her, in addition to Ren being basically down and out due to being shot. I don't want to look much deeper than that.
My one rant
ReplyDeleteHow do you aim a planet? And sucking the energy from a sun? These things killed me. Even if I want to buy into the huge plasma shot across the galaxy to a planet how did they manage to make the plasma shot divide up and track 5 different planets?
How do you even hide a project like that and once you use it how is every person in the galaxy not on board with destroying it.
Lastly who pays for this stuff because they are seriously going to get a huge ding in their paycheck... maybe even fired.
I enjoyed the new characters and would love a movie not full of distractions from just them.
To me, outlandish, illogical scale is one of the primary cores of SW.
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Attempt to recapitulate the original was an interesting approach to take, and definitely paid off with the nostalgia crowd, but I suspect Abrams didn't really understand what he was doing with it. For him it's all visual all the time. The result is epic yes, but definitely not mythic. It does not itself resonate with the viewer, carry them along or change them.
Any resonance the audience feels is carried on from the audience expectations, not from the movie itself. There is no myth in the making here (no matter how clumsily it may have been done in the past).
Devin Night Remember, 35 years ago, these folks built the first death star. Even if (most) people in the SW galaxy are illiterate, progress is continuing -- the X-wings and BB8 are signs of that. In 35 years, we went from the beginning of world war one (1917, give or take) to the H-bomb. That's from trench warfare and mustard gas to the power to level a city in a moment. That didn't bring me out at all, if anything it seemed an homage to everything in Star Wars; there's always a bigger planet destroying super weapon.
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On the superweapon: aiming it could conceivably be handwaved because how do you aim anything in hyperspace? normal 3-dimensions don't apply.
Here's a better question: HOW DID THEY RELOAD IT. The Starkiller uses up one stellar mass every time it fires. So, they fired it twice in the space of, what, a day? Were they in a globular cluster or something? Did they have extra suns just lying around?
Fiona Zimmer During the movie, I just dug on a solar-powered super weapon. But, yes, that is problematic. Maybe it only uses it up for a time, and the sun can then regen?
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The weapon is fired twice during the movie (or at least, they attempt to fire it a second time) so either it can navigate around or it just darkens the fuel star, maybe stripping the energy out of its outer layers, and the star eventually brightens / becomes harvestable again.
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Also, re Kylo vs. Rey / Finn, my impression was that Kylo was a star pupil at all the Force stuff but was an indifferent or maybe even totally untrained lightsaber fighter. Really, his saber is shown as a tool of bullying and execution and vandalism rather than a weapon (so far as one can make that distinction, which is a weird one to make now that I type it out)
So it didn't bother me when he got owned.
My take was that they moved Starkiller between firings.
ReplyDeleteRobert Bohl So ... you've got a thing that destroys a sun to power itself, and then kills planets. That seems ... excessively evil at both ends!
ReplyDeleteIt certainly breaks character from JJ's typical muted, subtle style.
ReplyDeleteChristopher Wargo And normally, he explains things so much more explicitly. Its like he was replaced with Vernor Vinge.
ReplyDeleteWilliam Nichols - Beautifully Dark Side, isn't it? I love it.
ReplyDeleteRobert Bohl This goes to how I'd want to use a corruption mechanic in a Star Wars game. Basically, anytime you treat people like objects rather than as people, you gain corruption. With 5, erase and get a corruption advance. Get too many of those, and retire and become a threat.
ReplyDeleteStolen liberally from Urban Shadows, of course, but I think it could just work well in star wars. This'd have the difference between Tarkin and Ackbar be corruption.
UPSIDE DOWN WINGS ON THE BACK OF RACE CARS
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(little puddle of spoiler tears at the bottom)
2. Action figure
3. Huh. Never thought about that before, but you are so right.
4. Fan service
6-9. Reasonably within the scope of bullshit previously established in Star Wars milieu.
12. That whole sequence probably bothers me more than anything in the movie, both in plot structure terms as well as the bizarro thing where a bunch of planets were all in the same frame being destroyed and then they see it from some other star system. Like I was seriously confused what was actually happening, like if the blasts were arriving to destroy the Resistance stronghold too. Really bad job of setting up the context for this.
13. Deus ex machina
Phasma apparently has a lot to do going forward.
ReplyDeleteLarry Lade Yeah, like I said: these are things that bothered me, and I'm sure there's bullshit justification for all of them. That is: this is not a universal list, but a list of things that took me right out of the fiction. Explaining it away doesn't help that.
ReplyDeleteI also had the moment of "seriously, what the HELL is going on?" during the blasts that made no sense. I was very confused.