Star Wars: The Force Awakens: Good news, bad news (spoilers spoilered) · 4:08am Dec 19th, 2015
The good news: It doesn't suck. There's some idiot ball (like "Instead of just shooting this guy, I'll fight him with this GIANT ELECTRIC MANGA SWORD I happened to bring with me to a gunfight", "let's walk into this bar full of interplanetary riff-raff with a droid that half the galaxy is looking for", a military base having lots and lots of laser turrets but no gates, guards, or locks, and large spaceships can fly across the universe in a few seconds and go through defensive shields at faster than lightspeed, so why don't they just load one with explosives or in fact just mass). But it doesn't have endless blue-screened scenes with two people walking or sitting on sofas while they talk about trade negotiations. It introduces a couple of good new characters, and has great camera work, amazing sets, and a pace fast enough to push you past the plot holes.
The bad news: It doesn't suck because they re-used plot elements that worked in the first two movies. If somebody else had made this movie, Lucas would've sued for plagiarism. Star destroyer blots out the sky? Check. Plucky young working-class hero just struggling to get by on a desert planet? Check. Cute droid with plans a map vital to the Rebellion is on said planet? Check. Evil jedi lord and Empire New Order leader in a black cape and mask follows them across the desert? Check. Creepy old holographic Dark Lord is his teacher and ruler of the Empire New Order? Check. Millenium Falcon more nimble than TIE fighters? Check. Dark lord vs. father/son conflict? Check. There is another? Check. Colorful alien bar scene? Check. Torture+interrogation scene? Check, check. Crash landings? Check, check. The Empire will use a super-weapon to destroy the planet the rebel base is on? Check. Break into a high-security prison to rescue a girl and disable the McGuffin? Check. Confrontation on catwalk above inexplicable requisite giant vertical shaft? Check. Rebels must inexplicably fly X-wing fighters down a trench before they can shoot at the one critical weak point which will blow up the planet-buster, which they inexplicably still haven't developed 20th-century Earth-level munitions to do? YES THEY'RE SERIOUSLY BLOWING UP THE DEATH STAR AS THE GRAND FINALE FOR THE THIRD TIME. Clock counts down to the final second before the Death Star Mark 3 explodes? Check. I feel silly spoilering this stuff; some of these are being used for the third or fourth time in the series. This stuff comes pre-spoiled.
Competent evil overlords use after-action reviews so that stuff like this doesn't happen twice.
The movie tries to do too much in too short a time. There are too many relationships that aren't sufficiently explained or exploited, like Han and Leia, Leia and whatsisname, Han and whatisname, and whatsisname and the red-haired guy. The dialog that tells us how important and feelful they are (because they don't have time to show us) is painfully theatrical. The parent/son relationship is especially heavy-handed. We get nothing but the bare minimum number of lines of dialog needed to tell us what happened and how important it is.
I'm still confused about who the New Order is. They use Stormtrooper uniforms and Empire spaceships. Are they not the Empire? Are they a cult within the Empire? Is the Great Leader not a Sith? Why can't we just call them the Empire and the Sith? Either re-use your villains or make up new ones; don't just plaster new names on your old villains or it'll be like level 4 on an 80's videogame, which is what this movie feels like. At least videogames changed the color schemes.
Basically it's episode IV and part of episode V crammed into one movie. Several times I found myself wondering why I wasn't on the edge of my seat when I had been when I saw the same scene in Star Wars. I guess because I already saw the same scene in Star Wars. It might have made the movie for me if I hadn't guessed how the catwalk scene would go, but I've read Freud. I think this is the only time it's ever been useful to me oh wait no it spoiled a movie for me.
I lost my involvement with the movie at the point where they put up some computer graphics to say, "No, see, it's not the Death Star yet again. It's a really big Death Star."
The movie isn't as scientifically accurate as the previous ones. Yes, I said that. And here's where I have one important disagreement with J. J. Abrams: The treatment of time in hyperspace. Wait, lemme sidebar this.
The Star Wars movies are fast-moving. But in the earlier movies, compressing the time of action into movie time was done by cutting away from the boring parts. When someone gets on a spaceship in Episodes I - VI and goes somewhere, they cut away and let the spaceship get there. They're travelling in hyperspace, yet it takes time.
And if the plot involves going someplace really far away--it's never clear what that means, but some places are really far away--it takes more time to get there. So the scripts are written so that if they need two people to meet in person five minutes from now, those two people are already at least in the same star system.
Now, if somebody needs to go somewhere, they go on a ship, go into hyperspace, come out of hyperspace about 3 seconds later, and they're there, with no cuts. And if the Empire's new weapon is halfway across the galaxy and you need to get there in 5 minutes, no problem.
There are 3 problems with this. First is that the sense of epic grandeur is lost. Space is no longer big when it takes less time for the heroes to get across the galaxy than it does for me to get across town. (I almost want to write a hard SF story about what happens if it takes less time to travel any distance in a straight line than to the other side of the same planet.)
Second is that the physical infrastructure of reality is the author's friend. You gotta have rules. If anything is possible, then there's no story. Why doesn't whats-her-name mind-control the guys manning the Death Star Mark 3 from across the galaxy? No, seriously, why doesn't she? (Also, names aren't used often enough. I can't remember the names of most of the new characters.)
So once you've established that spaceship travel from anywhere to anywhere takes zero time, the audience is going to have questions like, Why did they send only fighters on a bombing mission? Or, How long can a war last when you can drop a warfleet on top of anyone anywhere instantaneously? Or, Why do most people in the galaxy live in awful places when they could get to beautiful, fertile, uninhabited places in a few minutes?
The third problem is that the characters have no down-time. From Hollywood's perspective, this is a feature, not a bug. There's a new dogma going around Los Angeles, which I talked about in my post on Scene & Sequel and the movie Gravity. It says that a story should rush the protagonist through a series of scenes, and in each scene the protagonist is threatened at the start, deals with the problem, and this results in another problem. And the movie should go just like that, scene-scene-scene-scene, from start to finish, dragging the viewer through to the end with no pauses.
I disagree.
Characters sometimes need time to think.
ImagineLord of the RingsorThe Hobbitwithout any of the pauses between adventuresoh wait I saw those movies. Okay, imagine Empire Strikes Back with no Yoda.
It's now canon that in the Star Wars universe, practice, whether flying a ship, firing its weapons, or fighting with a light-saber, serves no purpose. (This probably explains stormtrooper marksmanship as well.)
I'd rather have seen it stretched out into 2 movies, or else ditch Han and Leia. I'd like for Luke's appearance at the end to have been a surprise. (Better yet, to have been the start of the next movie and a surprise. It's more like a beginning than an ending.) And make Jar-Jar the evil mastermind.
You're going to see the movie anyways, but if you want to make it more fun, write down a bunch of plot elements from the first two movies, put them on cards in a 5x5 grid, and play plot rehash bingo. Alternately, watch Star Wars or Empire Strikes Back instead.
Well it sounds very good.
Maybe somepony will make a story on it soon.
OI PAGE BREAK THAT SHIT, MAN.
~Skeeter The Lurker
So...
Are you saying its a reboot?
Are you saying its a faithful AU fanfic?
Are you saying its a Star Wars film?
I'm far more excited for The Hateful Eight this christmas. I really dig the setting, the actors, and what little has been seen of the characters.
This confirms my desire of not being in any rush to see this film.
Honestly, I picked up on most of your critique, but I really enjoyed the film anyway because it was done well enough, and the particulars were different enough, that I didn't care if it yanked the base elements from A New Hope. When you think about it, the original Star Wars trilogy took tons of things from other films, anyway.
I really enjoyed it a lot, and it's light years ahead of the prequels, but it didn't pull me in like the originals did. I was never really on the edge of my seat until the very end with the lightsaber fight, and even then the investment could have been a bit higher. Whether this is simply because it's not First-Time-Star-Wars-Experience I don't know. Long story short: I liked Fin the most, though I don't think they justified his desertion from the First Order nearly enough. Ray (however you spell her name) was also good but less defined than Fin, I felt. By the end I didn't find the level their friendship had reached as believable as the movie wanted. And I think their relationship progressed too easily. Han and Leia and Luke bicker and fight in A New Hope most of the movie and don't feel like friends until after the death star is destroyed. Poe I liked but he's the least fleshed out, though he also doesn't really need to be here.
I didn't like Han and Leia's return as much as I would have wanted, but they have some great moments. Han's death I'm not very satisfied with (I knew by default going in they were gonna off him); I don't think it was as fitting for his character as it could/should have been. I'm picky about that sort of thing. The reuse of elements didn't bother me as it seems to have for you, and you could argue forever about what was done out of love for the originals versus from a lack of ideas. The soundtrack mostly wasn't really there for me, and while the movie manages to return a level of mystique and magic to the force, those moments still felt a bit, I don't know, muddled? Not quite there emotionally.
But in the end, it felt like a real
universegalaxy again populated by real people, with real feelings and motivations. I had a lot of fun, and I think it's laid a good foundation to move forward on, and I'm excited for the future, where I think they can iron out some of the larger kinks in the characters and their relationships (which, I will give credit, the movie really tried to get right, and I appreciate that a lot).Hm, I think you can tell I haven't gotten to talk about this much. :p
My brother's girlfriend had never seen a Star Wars movie before. My brother is dragging her out to watch it, so he made her watch the original trilogy first. I'll have to ask her what she thought.
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Exact same situation with my brother's wife. What did she think of the originals? I'm buying her star wars stuff for Christmas now.
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She liked Star Wars: A New Hope well enough, but thought The Empire Strikes Back was the better movie of the two.
On the other hand, my brother spent less time during The Empire Strikes Back filling her in on random Star Wars trivia.
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Empire Strikes back pretty much is the best of all the movies. I've got a soft spot for ROTJ, though. I'll have to find out which my sis in law liked the most. Ha, I'm sure you're brother was happy for that.
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TBH I've always liked A New Hope more, but it and The Empire Strikes back are my two favorites, with Return of the Jedi coming in third. A New Hope is pretty self-contained, while The Empire Strikes Back and The Return of the Jedi are much less so. I think my biggest problem with The Return of the Jedi is that it really does feel like the second half of something else.
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I'm saying it is to Star Wars as the Sword of Shannara is to Lord of the Rings.
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If you get a chance, see an old British WW2 movie called The Dam Busters. The X-wing trench run from Star Wars was lifted from it. Content warning: There's a black dog whose name is the N-word. That's why you never see this movie on TV.
My one particular gripe: someone needs to kidnap JJ Abrams, strap him to a chair à la Clockwork Orange, and make him watch Cosmos or something, because he has less than zero grasp of scale in space. Actively negative grasp. In this, at least, it wasn't as important to the plot as it was in Star Trek, but my eyes rolled when they were watching planets in other systems blow up.
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Can't blame you there. And true, A New Hope ends much like the first Matrix. You'd be excited to learn there's more, but you don't need it. And it has my favorite ending of any of them, I think.
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Horse Voice told me this a while ago, actually.
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I have fond memories of the shannara books, enough to remember that they were neat, not great...
That comparison does inspire concern!
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That bad, huh?
Look, I liked Sword... when I was just a kid. But then I took in the LOTR series and I got the distinct sense of deja vu in reverse, whatever that is. Preja vu, perhaps. Seriously, the first two books just lifted the absolute shit out of LOTR. You can basically go down the first book assigning Fellowship... characters to it. There are two functionally identical elves instead of one Legolas. That is seriously the only difference. And Elfstones... was basically like a cleanup pass to use up anything else the first pass failed to plagiarize. (Powerful magic item that can't be safely used lest it draw the attention of wraith-like hunters? Check. Two princely brothers defending a fortified city with introduced Wrong Kid Died complex? Can you say Boromir, Faramir, and Minas Tirath, respectively?
It's ok if you can't they are hard words)Thankfully, Brooks developed enough by Wishsong... that he was recognizably writing his own stories and developing his own style. Unthankfully, when he developed his own style, I didn't really care for it. Irony?
My overall impression was good, but:
My biggest problem is JJ's usual problem of pacing. The entire movie felt like it took place in an especially bad monday afternoon. There was no sensation of any time passing at all in the background.
And Kylo Ren was dark and menacing until he took off the helmet. First thing that came to mind was starting to call him "Pouty McBignose".
Otherwise a most excellent movie.
But then again, anyone fed a 3-course meal of dog turds will think even a dry cracker for dessert would be a taste explosion.
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And Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress. Lucas "borrowed" so much from it that he was dead-set on casting Toshiro Mifune as Obi-Wan Kenobi or, failing that, Darth Vader.
Come to think of it....Star Wars: A New Hope is basically the blueprint for both modern nerd culture and modern remix culture, isn't it? That can't be a coincidence.
3628671 Interesting idea about Star Wars being a remix. But I saw Hidden Fortress, and offhand I can't think of any plot similarities. I barely remember it now, though.
3628499 3628555 It's not a fair comparison--the new movie is still well-produced, and it doesn't copy the plot of Star Wars like Shannara copied the plot of LOTR. It copies lots of pieces, but not the whole structure.
3628557 I think the rapid pacing was deliberate. It's the new thing in Hollywood. See the new quote box in my post.
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the hidden fortress has an arquebus powerful enough to destroy an entire island!the bickering peasant characters inspired him to begin the movie from the droids' point of view..... and that's about it for the plot. maybe it was much more similar in early drafts and gradually became something completely different. it was more of a big influence in visual style and samurai culture, but I wouldn't say it's a Fistful of Dollars level of "remake"
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True, I agree that it is not a good thing. A movie that was paced superbly was Guardians of the Galaxy. Wish James Dunn had got a shot at Star Wars instead.
JJ isnt bad (atleast he is much better the Michael Bay), but his movies make me feel that if he gave just a little more of a damn, his movies would go from good to excellent. Never really feel his movies has any soul so to speak.
Guardians of the Galaxy oozed soul from every pore.
But credit where credit is due, real locations and props, awesome. None of this walking and talking green screen space taxes nonsense.
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C-3PO and R2-D2, the two bickering side characters whose POV the film is told from, are very obviously supposed to be the two peasants in Hidden Fortress, and Toshiro Mifune is like some weird blend of Han Solo (cocky rogue) and Obi-Wan (disgraced older general). The princess is just straight-up Leia. And then there's the
swordlance fight where Toshiro Mifune has to fight his scarred former friend while the entire enemy army stands at the sidelines and watches....It's not blatant, but going into the film knowing Lucas was inspired by it, the parallels practically leap off the screen.
3629192 It was much more prominant in the early scripts, that were flash gordon fanfiction
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The new quotebox accurately describes the why behind Abrams' complete disrespect for scale in space. It also puts its finger on a problem I've been having with a number of new movies: Action Fatigue. By the end of STID and The Hobbit, I simply did not give a shit what happened in the next action sequence. My action receptors were burned out. Too much action was strung in too fast and too close together, and every sequence was allowed to drag on for too long.
TFA is doing better on this front because it has a lower proportion of problem-solution sets where the solution is 'long action sequence' (often the solution is 'short action sequence', but even that helps the problem a lot) but I see where it's suffering from the same basic problem. I wonder how many suits had to get this 'problem-solution drag' idea into their head for it to become so dominant in Hollywood.
If Disney had (correctly) advertised this movie as a reboot instead of a sequel, no one would have minded. But, eh, oh well.
To be fair, the underlying flaw is one that any such device will, by its very nature, possess.
Having said that, I enjoyed the movie greatly, re-boot-iness and all. The only thing that went beyond "callback" for me was the super-duper Death Star with even more unstable energy containment but I can see why they wanted something like that: that's what underworlds look like in the Star wars universe.
My biggest criticism is basically that the movie could have ended about 10 minutes earlier; basically when Rey got on the falcon to go find Luke. Or maybe even right as R2 woke up, but that might have been a bit short. Still, the whole last sequence was unecessary and would have been better as the opening to the first act of the sequel, right after they re-establish the First Order as bad guys.
I see that I was right to not watch this movie:
After watching Stino (Star-Trek-In-Name-Only), I could tell that Abrams does not give a crap about continuity. From your description, it sounds like Disney realized this and told him to follow the previous movies. It sounds like he responded by mashing together Episodes # Ⅳ and Ⅴ. Despite rehashing previous Star Wars, it still manages to ignore continuity —— ¡Abrams crapped on the Expanded Universe!
Post Scriptum:
I am sick of hipsters dumping on the prequels. It certainly is true that Episode # Ⅰ sucks (Lucas could add all of the special effects in the world and did), but Lucas learned his lesson and made Episodes # Ⅱ & Ⅲ right. Hate Episode # Ⅰ all you want, but Episodes # Ⅱ & Ⅲ are as good as movies from the Original Trilogy. When I see hipsters bashing Episodes Ⅱ & Ⅲ because it is the "In"-thing to do, ¡I then want to Execute Order # 66 onto them!
3631973 If you liked Return of the Jedi, you'll likely like this movie - it's extremely well made, has many new elements including, and this is where I disagree with the main thesis here, excellently developed *new* characters, and frankly JJ is a vastly better filmmaker than Lucas.
It's only overly derivative if you think a sequel shouldn't reference it's predecessor.
3630581 3631973 Sorry if I gave the wrong impression. It's not a reboot, and it doesn't ignore continuity. It just uses a bunch of the same plot elements. Like, very specific plot elements. Like a cute droid with a secret map the Rebel Alliance needs is fleeing across the desert from a Sith lord in a black cape and mask directing the search from aboard an Empire star destroyer, and is found by a spunky young working-class hero who is a nobody but will turn out to be a powerful new jedi, and together they escape from stormtroopers aboard the Millenium Falcon. For starters.
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Also
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When three ponies in a bowling alley look like characters from The Big Lebowski, that's a reference.
When two of the three Big Lebowski ponies show up at Cranky's wedding carrying a box, that's a reference. It's on screen for about half a second.
When Raiders of the Lost Ark had a tiny R2D2 and C3PO in among a wall full of Egyptian hieroglyphics for a quarter of a second of screen time, that was a reference.
When there are some (Spielberg) E.T.s in the galactic senate in Phantom Menace, that's a reference.
When Pinkie drums like Animal from the Muppets, that's a reference.
When Dr. Hooves wears a Tom Baker scarf in "Slice of Life", that's a reference.
When James Cameron used the set-up of Harlan Ellison's story "Soldier", in which one soldier from the far future is transported to our time, and another follows after to kill him, for Terminator, that wasn't a reference; that was plagiarism, which is why Cameron settled with Ellison and Ellison now appears in the credits for Terminator.
When Eddie Murphy claimed to have written "Coming to America" for Paramount after they had optioned a story with the same basic plot elements from Art Buchwald, that was plagiarism, which is why Paramount paid Buchwald $900,000.
A plot element can't be a "reference". Re-using a plot element = re-using part of a story = not writing a new and interesting story. When most of a movie is made up of recycled plot elements, it's not "homage" or "reference". It's laziness.
Think about it. What would that mean if writing a movie where you re-use major plot elements, and detailed scenarios, is okay because it's "homage"? Would it have been "homage" if Romancing the Stone had opened with taking an idol from a temple deep in the jungle and then being chased out of it by a giant rolling boulder? Would you want to see all those movies?
And, no, I think a story should almost never reference itself. Besides being weirdly narcissistic, that's shoving it in your face that what you are watching/reading is a story. I'm on the fence about other references--I don't like them in serious scenes unless they're so subtle that hardly anyone would find them without knowing they were there--but referencing the story that you're telling? There are one or two instances of that in ancient literature--I think Gilgamesh?--and a bunch from post-modern literature, but unless you're writing meta-fiction or making a specific point with it, it's a big no-no in my book. Things that yank the reader/viewer out of the story are bad. They're more accepted now, and I think this may be because people are better at context-switching. They can switch out of and back into a story more easily. But it still shows disrespect for the story being told.
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¿What about the super fast hyperspace-travel? This violates continuity:
In Episodes # Ⅰ & Ⅳ, we have scenes taking place in Hyperspace, lasting minutes.
If you want to see great crossover of Star Trek and Star Wars which is much better than Swino and Stino, read Conquest:
Conquest
It takes place after the end of the Dominion-War and in an alternate future where terrorists kill the parents of the Solo-offspring, they flip out and kill the terrorists and after going to the Dark Side, try turning the New Republic into an organization where terrorism cannot exist. Jacen Solo seizes control of the New Republic and declares himself Emperor, Luke Skywalker confronts him and Jacen slays Luke. The New Empire is out to conquer the Galaxy Milky Way.
Bad Horse is write about the minimum time a war requires depends on how fast one can deploy. In Passages In The Void, a machine-civilization spanning the Milky Way has a civil war. FTL does not exist in this universe. The fastest they can travel .1C, because of resistance of the InterStellar Medium, and typical speeds are .01C. Their war lasts 5*10^8 years. ¡Yes!, ¡500,000,000 years!
* Passages In The Void
* The Passage Home
* Rite Of Passage
* Mortal Passage
* Revelation-Passage
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¡Bravo!
The only error I saw is Empire Star Destroyer. All Stardestroyers belonging to the Empire are Imperial Stardestroyers. The iconic mile-long Stardestroyer with a crew-complement of 25 thousand is an Imperator-Class Stardestroyer, often just called an ImpStar. Other Stardestroyer-Classes exist such as the kilometer-long Victory-Class Stardestroyer which can travel through atmosphere, land in special cradles and bodies of liquids such as hydrocarbons, ammonia, liquid nitrogen, liquid hydrogen, water, et cetera.
The Empire has lots of other kinds of Starships such as Starfrigates, Starcruisers, et cetera. An example is the 20 KM long Executor-Class Stardreadnought with a crew-complement of a million.
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This holds if, and only if, not completely new is always the same as not interesting; an axiom with which I flatly disagree. I've seen many stories done more than once where the later take was better. (Terminator 2, Stargate: Atlantis, Starship Troopers (well, the movie and book - which have the same underlying plot - are two totally different and equally good stories)) I've also seen a lot of the opposite (oh gods Robocop) - it depends on the storytellers involved. The story in TFA is not wholly original, but that does not mean it isn't different. It's a different take on the premise; and one done with the permission (bitterly given though it may be) of the original writer. And the new team did amazingly well with it.
Even if we accepted the premise that originality is necessary for quality, it would mean the Return of the Jedi, which re-uses many of the same plot elements from A New Hope but with characters flipped - was a bad movie because it had a rescue sequence, a lightsaber duel that's really not a swordfight, a trench run with an x-wing and the Millennium Falcon blowing up the Death Star after someone else took out a shield generator and the female leader of the Rebel Alliance looks on while not actually doing anything because it's up to her troops now.
The story they decided to tell called for the remnants of the Empire to try again - and once they made that choice, the rest pretty much had to fall into place the way it did. I can accept that that choice wasn't the only one, but changing that is making a different movie.
Frankly, I think you might be applying a literary standard that doesn't really belong in film: movies are almost never original stories. The very first scripted film was an adaptation - original movies came later. "New story" is a laudable trait in a film, but neither required nor even really expected. Aside from not crediting people, it's not really seen as a problem within the art.
Also, if they didn't ignore strategic practicality in favor of over-the-top aesthetics, they wouldn't be space Nazis. (Have you seen some of the tank plans Hitler approved? 3 stories tall!) *Of course* they built another Death Star; they need to show that they are, in fact, the Empire Reborn - and they need to have a way of attacking the Republic that will not only defeat the Republic fleet but will instill fear in all the other systems that haven't bowed to the First Order yet. They even succeeded on the first point - the Republic Senate and Fleet are vapor. They only failed on the second point because in that universe, you cannot contain that much energy without a lot of delicate equipment - and that stuff was well-defended. Even for Anakin or Luke there should have been no way to destroy the thermal oscillator^1
There will be a new Jedi - because it's a Star Wars movie. If you want Star Wars without Jedi, watch Firefly again.^2 Of course they're running from stormtroopers, that's the bad guy troops when the bad guys are the Empire 2.0. Of course they use the Millennium Falcon - Han Solo is in this movie. It's be like Bond without a tuxedo or Indy without his hat.
Putting new and different characters through situations previously conceived of is not the same thing as doing the same thing twice. It's certainly not the most creative option, and it's possible that they could have made a better movie if they had written a more original story^3; but the story they went with is Empire 2.0 and they handled that about as well as they possibly could have. I'm not being hyperbolic when I say JJ Abrams is his generation's Steven Spielberg.
As for meta-references; I didn't catch any in the movie. It, being a sequel, makes reference to things that happened before, but all sequels do that - otherwise they really wouldn't be sequels, now would they? All the references were in-universe that I'm aware of.
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I thought you said you hadn't seen it?
I assure you, it's Star Wars through and through. Heck, Bad Horse thinks it's too much like the original.
^1 Not that the movie is perfect - the technobabble is pretty weak, and the last scene should have been cut entirely, and the lack of acknowledgement between Leia and Chewie at the end will probably bug me forever. I also generally agree with Jordanis's complaint about scale - even in a movie about space wizards they really pushed it.
^2 In fact, do that anyways. I'm going to.
^3 Which would require a wholly different villain. And the last time they tried that, we got Yuuzhan Vong.
On the other hand - The Nostalgia Critic is totally with you on this. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
3631973 I don't dump on the prequels because I'm a "hipster", I dump on the prequels because I genuinely did not enjoy any of them at all. I think they were terrible. I could go into extremely lengthy rants about all the things they did wrong, all the opportunities they missed, all the poor dialogue and plot and filming choices that were made... I think they're awful on just about every level. That is my opinion, and it's fine if you disagree, but it's frankly offensive to dismiss somebody whose opinion differs from your own as dishonest and only pretending so they'll seem cool. It's far more likely that somebody says they dislike something because they actually dislike it.
I ended up being just fine with it, because I wanted to see Star Wars and I got Star Wars. This is probably in part due to the prequels lowering my expectations, and it supports the pop culture axiom of regurgitating the same four chords over and over... but it scratched the exact itch I wanted. The bits with Han and Leia were, to me, painful in their nostalgia; I sobbed like a bitch after the death when their motif played Finn was a refreshing Everyman, if a bit goofy. Rey is... intriguing in her potential to add to the lore, but ill-defined in this episode. Poe is hawttttt. The reveal of the X-Wings to liberate the captive heroes was a nice deploy, because we had heard plenty about the Resistance, but the movie had been so heavily focused on New Order Stormtroopers thanks to Finn, that the X-Wings' appearance was a genuine heroic relief. Good thematic use. I could blab on, but in short, there's enough that I see here to be optimistic about.
The pacing, and the argument of Episode 4 + 1/2 Episode 5 is legitimate. My hope is that the faster pacing implies "yes, you're seeing all familiar stuff here, but we're quickly painting a familiar landscape here so that the next movies will take a different path; Rebuild of Evangelion came to mind as a comparison. Kylo Ren was completely ineffectual; I kept forgetting his name and he was about as intimidating as Episode 2 Anakin. My hope is that this was deliberate, and that he will grow from an emo little shit into a genuine terror, before finally being defeated. While I was able to "yes, okay sure" most of the bits of nostalgia, the only one I refused to accept was when Death Star 3 is being attacked, but hey at least it's a bombing run! That's unique! Lawl j/k, single fighter on a trench run, because Shut Up. That point got an audible grumble out of me. And yes, the fact that the film's (in my mind) success hinged upon nostalgia does mean that this film will probably end up below the Original Trilogy in my mind... and yet, in the end I'm exciting to see more.
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I do not see how you could not like Episodes # Ⅱ & Ⅲ. Episode # Ⅰ, under the excessive special effects has a good plot. I do not blame you for not seeing it, because Lucas got carried away with the new special effects (he learned his lesson for the other movies). If watches the Phantom -Edit, an unauthorized reedit, removing the clutter, it is obvious. It is like looking at a pond and seeing only glare, and then putting on polarized sunglasses, and seeing pretty colorful sea-creatures. The glare is the original edit, and the sunglasses is the Phantom-Eit:
# 00. Senator Palpatine manipulated the Trade-Federation into Blockading Naboo.
# 01. He convinces them that if they invade, they will get all they want and he will make it legal.
# 02. His real plan is to send in Darth Maul for killing the Queen.
# 03. Darth Maul would frame the Trade-Federation for the Regiciced, which happened during their occupation of Naboo.
# 04. He would force a vote of no confidence against Chancellor Valorum.
# 05. He would manipulate the debate by using the Force to manipulate the minds of the other Senators for getting himself elected Chancellor.
# 06. Becoming Chancellor would be his next step towards seizing total power.
# 07 He would use the Starnavy of the Republic for destroying the starfleet of the Trade-Federation, thus killing the witnesses.
# 08. No plan survives contact with the enemy.
# 09. 2 Jedis liberate the Queen.
# 10. He encourages her to address the Senate
# 11. This speech allows him to accomplish # 04 through # 06.
That is the plot of Episode # Ⅰ. Everything else is just distracting special effects.
The plots of episodes # Ⅱ & Ⅲ are obvious because Lucas learned from his excessives, and showed moderation:
In Episode # Ⅱ, Chancellor Palpatine engineers a civil war so that he can gain emergency-powers, thus allowing him to seize total power later.
In Episode # Ⅲ, Chancellor Palpatine has sufficient power to seize control of the Republic. He declares himself Emperor and the Republic, an Empire, wipes out the Confederation of Independent Systems, and orders the Clone-Troopers to execute Order # 66, thus wiping out 99% of the Jedi-Order. We also learn that Darth Plagueis created Anakin Skywalker by manipulating midi-chlorians:
Unfortunately, although Darth Plagueis achieved immortality, he was not indestructible, so found himself murdered in his sleep at the hand of his apprentice, Darth Sidious (Sheev Palpatine).
Episodes # Ⅱ & Ⅲ do not require a special edit, because it is clear what the plot of them is to the viewer.
Having just seen that movie, and been able to return to the internet - I agree.
It was a good movie. It also ripped off the originals to make it a good movie.
And yes, all of the plot holes you mention are perfectly valid (Also; the fact that a soldier, trained from childhood to be utterly loyal to the New Order and to be a perfect killing machine, who is disciplined and experienced enough to be dispatched on a top-priority mission, suddenly grows a conscience and decides he doesn't want to kill people... because they killed his friend? Er, no.
What really happened is the ace pilot died under torture, the droid was retrieved by the New Order, and a few weeks later they delivered a crushing blow to Rebel morale when they broadcast, live over the galactic extranet (?), the execution of the Last Jedi, and perhaps the destruction of the Jedi Temple).
Oh, please do. And then link it here. I know I'd read something like that.
3632167
If George Bernard Shaw hadn't been dead, he probably could've sued Ellison for plagiarizing Pygmalion. I mean, hey -- both Pygmalion and "Soldier" involve a strange newcomer living with a philologist and learning about each others' way of life! Clearly plagiarism.
Seriously, though, while Cameron may have borrowed the vague conceit of "two warriors from the future are transported to the present", (honestly, the Uncanny X-Men story "Days of Future Past" is a better contender for Terminator's inspiration), that's pretty much all the two works have in common, and it's not enough by far to fall under plagiarism. Especially not with all the stuff Cameron added to that nebulously vague idea.
Ellison is known for both being a fantastic writer and a fantastic crank. Settling out of court was probably just the least headache-inducing way to handle the situation.
3637627 I should have said, instead, that that resemblance was enough to fear losing a lawsuit. And I should have used only examples of people who won their lawsuits accusing plagiarism. The point I'd intended to make was that the number of plot points copied was well past the legal standard for plagiarism.
Any way I look at it, there was a lot of lazy and cowardly script copying. It's an educational opportunity, though. Compare each set of parallel scenes, between episode 7 & its equivalent in episode 4 or 5, and you can start to see how 4 and 5 built them up and made them emotionally powerful, while 7 just walked into and through them without groundwork. It would also be nice if somebody patient took a stopwatch and timed the equivalent scenes. I don't want to do that, but just one example is that episode 7 shows us nothing at all about the villagers in the opening, but a fairly long battle scene of them being killed, whereas Star Wars spent much more time (I think) showing the daily lives of 2 people, then didn't show their deaths, but their skeletons, for literally maybe 1/4 second. There are plot reasons 7 did it that way, but the way 4 did it was more powerful. Put a stopwatch on the Rebel strategy meetings (in the SAME FREAKING ROOM, no less) before attacking the Death Stars, & see how rushed it is in 7. Same for the fighter bombing runs. The biggest example is the final fatal father/son confrontation, which 4, 5, & 6 spent 3 full movies working up to, while 7 did it in less than 1, before we really knew who Kyle or whatever his name is was, or who Han had become.
Maybe more significant is the lack of strong defining character moments for any of the new characters, and the lack of character continuity (eg Finn acts nothing like someone who has been brainwashed his whole life; Han stops being Han on the catwalk; Luke and Hans are quitters).
Or, I dunno, maybe more significant is not knowing anything about the political or power situation. New Order, Republic, Resistance--who's in charge? Who's more powerful? Who's the underdog? Where did the big evil Sith come from, since the previous movies made it pretty clear that no such person exists? How did he build a planet-weapon when he seems to have, like, one brigade of troops?
Also, what are they fighting over, since they already blew up all the Republic planets? What's left? Who's left? Is the war over? Are there any surviving Republic or New Order forces? Either side might have lost 5% or 100% of their forces.
The more I think about it, the less I like the movie. The repetitiveness was just so bad that it stopped me from thinking about it further until now.
Now I want Episode 8 to be about the Resistance seizing power, then turning on each other, like the Bolsheviks or the French Revolutionaries. Then in 9, Finn will be Napoleon.
They had to make a bid for legitimacy after the prequels and being under new management; it's only fitting that it was a paint-by-numbers recreation of the original. I noticed those plotholes from a logical perspective, too, but had no trouble suspending my disbelief; it's not like decisionmakers even act rationally or competently in real life with any regularity, all the more so in a broad-strokes space adventure yarn that's to a large degree about giving us exciting set pieces. If something gets in the way of those, I just automatically assume there's some off-screen reason it wouldn't work or they wouldn't do it, even if that reason is galactic cultural bias (but then I never feel much need for in-universe explanations, anyway). I thought it was an excellent reboot/reimagining, and after seeing it I'll no longer be facetiously claiming everyone will turn against it in six months.
My favorite part, though, was actually Kylo Ren taking off his helmet. It was just such a good piece of metatext about how the movie was specifically trying to recreate the originals and feeling insecure about not living up to their legacy, combined with a "banality of evil" element that he's not in fact some imposing mythic figure, he's just an ordinary guy with an affectation he thinks makes him look like Darth Vader. There was something kinda raw about it, like it was breaking through from a different, far more realistic film. And I mean that in a good way—It wasn't out of place, it was a wink to the audience on a different level from the more explicit fanservice, and good reassurance that you should trust they made the choices they did advisedly.
Didn't care for Han and Leia in it until Han died, though—If they're doing a crypto-remake, the original didn't have a bunch of people from a different movie they had to get in there—It was all new and self-contained—but it did have Obi-Wan, whom they can now stand in for by dying,, in another riff on the whole intergenerational theme the series has going.
Totally agree about the "downtime" factor, though.
...And I guess I do have one realism gripe, though this is especially odd because lol Stormtroopers, but I wish they'd get a couple experts in to choreograph the Stormtroopers' movements. They don't even have to be better shots—I can easily believe the heroes are under some mystical protection—but I think everyone has seen enough news and GoPro footage in the intervening 30 years that the way they just ran around and shot their guns felt dated and kinda hokey. Maybe the costumes make it too difficult, I dunno. The electro-sword didn't bother me, though—The melee combat boat sailed long ago, so I was just like "well of course a guy would have that." Same with the warheads—It was never about what you could physically do if you could also build starships, it's about how big a punch you can show the audience each side is capable of.
3637906
That's a really good point. I liked it when he took it off, just for the contrast--that, and the hulk of the dead Imperial Star Destroyer, were among my favorite scenes. I didn't attribute the mask to his insecurity until later. I don't trust them, but we'll see what they do with him in later movies.
3637707
I don't think any of that's really to do with how much plot they borrowed from the older films. That's just Abrams's style. He's always been more of a flashy style guy who favors propulsive narratives, rather than genuine depth.
His pilot for Lost had lots of great moments, lots of energetic style and neat visual tricks, but the character moments can be very shallow. Sometimes it works -- like our introduction to Jack Shepherd, which has him immediately start treating crash victims, a perfect example of showing us he's a doctor rather than telling us -- but sometimes it just seems forced and undercooked, like when he comforts a fellow passenger on the crashing plane by telling her he'll keep her company until her husband gets back from the bathroom, which is a masterclass in sub-Tarantino dialogue overly-designed to seem casual.
It wasn't until Abrams left and Lindelof and Cuse became the permanent showrunners that the show started to really invest in its characters. Which kind of bit them in the ass, given how many people complained about the ending, but....they made the show they wanted to make, not the show the audience wanted them to make, and I respect that.
3633681
A) Most of the special effects in The Phantom Menace (and the following two films) were practical effects.
B) Star Wars has always been about an enormous number of practical effects overshadowing simplistic plots, bad dialogue, and wooden acting (when Spielberg, de Palma, Milius, et al watched the first film's rough cut without sound effects, music, or effects, they tactfully said it was terrible).
C) If you know Ian McDiarmid plays both the Emperor and Senator Palpatine, it's blatantly obvious what he's doing in the The Phantom Menace anyway. Failing that, the plot was clearly designed to make more sense in retrospect, after Episode III came out, which is why the film is subtitled "The Phantom Menace". I.e. Darth Sidious is a phantom menace whose motives and identity are a mystery.
3638663 What's a practical effect?
The music of Star Wars is a very underrated part of its power (and, since I'm talking about plagiarism, some of it was plagiarized from Holst's The Planets, but I don't mind). But I think a film written for dramatic music would necessarily look bad without the music. Without music, you'd need to go for something slow and meditative like 2001, Star Trek 1, or Silent Running. Name a good action movie with bad music. I could probably name a lot with good music/soundtracks: Raiders, Jaws, Superman.
3639019
A practical effect is one that isn't made using CGI. Although people love to bash the prequels as CGI-fests, most of the locations and vehicles were scale models, just like the original trilogy. And by "scale", I mean fucking huge. The Mustafar model was, like, over twenty feet long. Barring the obviously-digital characters like Grevious or Yoda replacing on-set puppeteers, the way the prequels were made was not as radically different from the original trilogy as purists seem to think it is.
Most of the digital workload was for compositing everything together, because you'd have to be a crazy person to still be using optical printers for bluescreen today.
3628557
Having seen the movie, I can now say:
He never should have taken off his helmet. Ever. He lost every bit of menace he had (which wasn't much) and it just reinforced the idea that he was a pouty brat.