A/V THE FORCE AWAKENS - The Official Movie Discussion Thread

Okay, now that I clicked the link... I hate you.

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I've hated Film Crit Hulk for years, but though I didn't agree with him on TFA, I don't think you should disregard him just because the gimmick is annoying. I mean, part of the reason I dislike it so much is because he often does make points worth considering that deserve better than to get buried by the off-putting Hulk shtick.

 

I think it's a pity he started out with a gimmick that he can't quite drop even after he's outgrown it, but even though I don't agree with every point he makes, he's a thoughtful, insightful critic and he's dead-on here.

 

My time on this Earth is finite, I don't want to spend precious minutes plowing through giant all caps text walls to glean some sort of insight. Drop the all caps and I'm down. But I shalt not read that.

 

If your life is just so hard, here.

 

It's a very good article, and it does put into words a lot of my issues with JJ Abrams as a filmmaker...or really, much more, with a lot of modern film-making in general. The desire to "push buttons" rather than get at realities is really endemic in modern film-making, even if its always been there to some degree. I don't even think TFA is very much of a special offender in this way; but then, I've already had a long talk with you about the film and what I think it's about on a deeper level.

I do disagree with some of his specific points (I think Finn's characterization does make sense, I found Han's death to actually be very effective, etc, etc), but overall he scores a number of very real points here (especially in regards to the very lazy plotting of the film)--even if my liking of TFA is based on what I think of as more fundamental things.. My biggest issue with the article, though, is when he gets into the whole nostalgia vs novelty thing. From where I'm sitting, he's fallen into an incredibly, incredibly, incredibly false and dangerous trap--because if taken at all seriously it would literally disqualify every work of human literature prior to the 20th century. Practically every great classic work of literature is built on memory and nostalgia, on the knowledge of a larger culture and community and other works of literature. The idea that art is supposed to give you this instant, brand-new, crazy experience that takes you out of the universe is a very, very modern idea, and I think the search for constant newness is every bit as dehumanizing as reboots and remakes, and is really what is responsible, on a basic level, with the issues of modern filmmaking.

The Iliad literally is a work built up out of hundreds and hundreds of minute references to mythology and stories and characters and places that it assumes you know about already; which is why it assumes you're going to find the Catalog of Ships absolutely riveting, with all those names and places and glorious references piling up over and over and over and over without even a plot to sustain them. More than this, literally everyone in the story already knows how the story ends; Achilles knows he's going to die; Hector knows Troy is doomed; and so on. It's also, thematically, a story entirely about this; about at least two characters (Hector and Achilles) who know the way their story is supposed to go, who knows that you know, but who are deeply troubled about just what memory is even worth, when everything you know and love is about to be gone forever; so it's also a story about nostalgia as well, about the love for the lost past, which is why everything in the story is built on the fundamental premise that things back then were just bigger, more heroic, stronger, and in every way better than things in the present. The Aeneid really takes this to the nth degree; it is literally Homerfan-fiction, as well as a remake of the universally-known and -propagated Augustan Roman founding myth; the entire point of it as a work of art is that you know this story already, that you've heard it many times before, that you even know probably most of the details, and that you also know and love all those Homer stories, and are going to thrill to hearing your story told in such glorious dactylic hexameters, like a true work of Homeric epic, with your hero, the founder of your city, wandering around the world of the Odyssey. More fundamentally, the character Aeneas is again entirely defined by nostalgia; he's a man desperately looking back, at what he once had, trying to preserve his memory at all costs, hoping it can be preserved or recreated somehow--and this is also true of almost every other character in the story as well. If you take away this aspect of memory, and yes, even of nostalgia, of the eminently Roman and human desire to look to the past to understand the present, to try to recapture what we used to have, to hold on to it and grieve it when it's gone and try desperately to get it back or recreate, then the whole thing becomes entirely empty and meaningless, just a few shipwrecks and some battle scenes. This is equally true for virtually every great work of the Western canon, including many of the books of the Bible. The entire Divine Comedy, for instance, is practically built out of references to every work of literature and every myth and every Biblical story and every person and every theological treatise you could ever think of, because Dante is a man of a culture, of a city, and he believes that all of this stuff is precisely what a human life is made out of. I can speak from experience when I say that the more you know of the Medieval Catholic worldview, with its theology and its mythology and its basic view of reality, the better you will find it; if you know nothing, it will be a bizarre freak-show conveying nothing. The Divine Comedy is also deeply nostalgic; it is the story of a man who finds himself "lost in a dark woods," with no idea how he ended up there, who then finds a way to make sense of his plight entirely through his memory and recollection of past events and ideas and stories, and is saved ultimately by a long-lost love from his youth.

Even the greatest Star Trek film, The Wrath of Kahn, is primarily a movie about memory and, yes, even nostalgia. Its basic thesis is inherently retrospective: that Kirk, the Kirk of the television show, the Kirk we all know and love, is fundamentally a shallow, pathetic man, a man without roots and without memory, who has always managed to go from one new thing to another new thing without dealing with the consequences of his actions; and that the only way for him to recover his youth is to go back and confront the ghosts of the past, embrace the son he never knew, confront the villain he hilariously outwitted that one time and stuck in a box somewhere, and finally deal with death itself. It's retrospective with a vengeance. Likewise, the reason why WOTK's version of the Death of Spock works, and the STID one doesn't, is because the former is built on memory in a way that the other one is not. The more we've seen of Kirk and Spock together, the more powerful the scene is; and even if we haven't seen much Star Trek, we can see, at least a little, the depth and age and memory of the relationship by the way the two men interact. Indeed, the entire way the scene lays itself out is built on memory and recollection and realization; Kirk and Spock talk largely in references to past interactions, true, but even more fundamental than what they say is the essential nature of their relationship, with its basic conflicts and contrasts, built up and gone through over hours and hours of television; it is this pervasive memory that underlies and gives meaning to everything, and if we don't get that, then the scene is almost meaningless. Spock really isn't in TWOK that much, even; but the power of his death is twenty-five years in the making. The scene in STID, by contrast, is too shallow, too unrooted in any history or recollection, to really work; it's a good idea on paper, but it has no bones to it, which is why it has to go with more clumsy references and repetitions.

I could go on and on and on about this and probably write entire books about it, but the point is, the idea, in this article, that nostalgia is a dirty word when it comes to art and cinema, that a work of art should primarily be an experience defined by novelty, is damnable nonsense on just about every level. Or so I think. So it's fine to critique TFA in all kinds of ways; but critiquing it because it's nostalgic, because it relies on memory, is utter nonsense, and I won't put up with it for a moment. Even if it was just about Star Wars, Star Wars is a lot of things, with a lot of memory and reality built into it; and even if it was just about the nostalgia for having watched Star Wars long ago in the golden days of one's youth, when the world was better, then that's still more than enough--immeasurably more than enough-- to build a great work of art on, as Vergil knew well. If TFA does a bad job with this, if it is too flashy and showy and shallow, then that must be blamed on the way it was done, and the men who did it. In fact, I would go so far as to say that if it was done badly, the culprit is precisely in a film-making culture focused above all else on novelty and experience, desperate to dazzle and shock--cuz if we can't get new novelty and experience, then perhaps the mere memory of it will suffice.

I happen to think, then, that TFA could have used more memory, not less; and the sense of memory and even nostalgia in the film is one of its strength, not its weakness.

 

WHY AM I JUST FINDING OUT ABOUT THIS HULK FILM CRITIC GUY? SOUNDS LIKE MY KIND OF DUDE!

 

Hah, I actually thought Finn was the clearest point where people who disagreed would have to concede he's on to something. Shows you what I know. But really, Finn is always likeable, yes, but his characterization is a mess. He's a stormtrooper raised in indoctrination, and then he's making flippant millennial jokes. He can't bring himself to kill villagers despite his indoctrination, but then he's gleefully slaughtering the people he actually grew up with five minutes later. There's just no coherency or consistency there. No strong, clear idea of who he is, the way Luke or Han are 100% thought-out, clear, consistent, easily understandable and describable characters whose nature is communicated by ANH.

As for nostalgia, I think you're operating on two different definitions. I don't think he's really talking about works playing on our sense of the past, on our accumulated knowledge, works that evoke a sense of longing for the past, any of that. He's talking specifically about works that ground their appeal in trying to recapture the inherently fleeting sense of experiencing a past work. As opposed to works that deliver a fresh story. Something like The Rocketeer or Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow can be based heavily in nostalgia in the first sense while still being fresh, innovative story experiences in the second sense. He's talking about the sense of trying to make you feel like a kid again by remaking Ghostbusters. But that's not actually going to deliver that feeling you want because it's just aping a thing you already saw while trying to give you the experience of seeing it for the first time. The way to actually have that experience again is to create a new comedy that hits you the way Ghostbusters hit you, fresh and unexpected and hilarious (you can actually get a clearer idea of what he's talking about by following that link to his discussion of comedy sequels). He's not talking about nostalgia in the larger cultural sense, but in the specific sense of trying to recreate the feeling of an earlier experience by just aping the experience rather than by understanding what elements of the experience actually gave you that feeling.

 

I kinda agree with him about the visuals. Honestly, visually I can't differentiate TFA from other modern blockbusters, it doesn't really push the limits like Lucas or Cameron did. I'm not a fan of Avatar but visually it was a treat and I think visuals and music are just as important as dialogues in movies. I liked the protagonists in TFA but I had the distinct impression the characters were aware they are in a Starwars movie, especially in the case of Han and Finn and sometimes it was really egregious.

 

Oh yay, more people trying to convince me that I didn't actually like The Force Awakens.

 

Film Critic Hulk cannot obviously be speaking objectively by Amy stretch of the imagination. Nor is Havac, in attempting to use the review as some kind of objective proof that TFA "didn't work."

It's worked for plenty of people.

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He wasn't trying to convince you of anything. He was just giving his reasons why he didn't think it was good.

 

I think contemporary Pop Culture Nostalgia is regarded as a phenomenon that by now basically has a definition of its own; people referring to it don't even need to know what the term nostalgia originally meant. That's obviously reductive, but hey, that's reality.

You could combine both - create a story about nostalgia that makes you think about your place in the universe, and at the same time tick all the boxes to gain the benefit of "audience nostalgia" and reduce your audience to creatures giving you their money because they liked something when they were adolescent, or more generally when they were at an earlier point of their existence. What franchises and sequels already did (and got criticised for by people/critics damning sequels replacing original ideas) is probably a proto-form of this (although that has a lot to do with simple brand recognition; you generally don't buy your favourite cereal or sneakers again because you're "nostalgic" for them); these days, thanks to the remake having a shiny new persona in the reboot, the phenomenon is also much more apparent.

The way it is used with blockbuster cinema and pop culture also seems to be pretty much set for the 80s/90s crowd; I can't imagine people who come from the 70s having a lot of market value (and yeah, I know that Star Wars is from 77). It's a complex thing, I imagine; probably because the 80s had so much development with marketing and franchise merchandise, and blockbuster mentality.

I guess the "vinyl is cool" movement, which cassette tape nostalgia is really not coming close to right now, is somewhat similar (and let's remember that David Bowie's 2013 comeback record went out of its way to remind that Bowie had done something famous in the 70s). Still, it's more of a fashion statement and less of a money-spending generation being hooked into its childhood.

 

What must Rian Johnson be thinking right now...

 

Probably something along the lines of:

"I have the best job in the world, but no matter what I do some fan or competitor is going to complain that it doesn't match up with their vision so screw it."

 

Probably nothing, Disney are paying him a load of money not to think, just do what they say

 

Yeah, Finn is all over the place, but his characterization just makes intuitive sense to me, the way the author says it should...the bouncing back and forth between an infectious desire to be accepted, an uncontrollable (but somewhat nervous) delight at finding himself a part of something amazing, and a profound fear of what lies behind him. On some level, he's someone who's just learning how to act like a functioning person at all, and the clumsiness and schitzophrenic nature of it is what makes it work for me, actually. I don't know, maybe I'm a strange person, but I get intuitively why Finn is acting the way he is most of the time...though I admit that they do go too far towards making him a comic relief character at times. And if we're comparing it to ANH, both Luke and Leia get over traumatizing events remarkably fast, too, and neither has any scruples or worries or regrets over killing anybody. So, I don't know, different strokes, man.

Almost all of the other plot and characterization points he makes are still definitely valid, though. I admit I got a little carried away with the whole nostalgia thing...maybe I drank too much sweet tea last night? I agree that what he's really targeting, in the negative sense, is what you're talking about (and what I admitted to as well in my initial post): a desire for novelty and fleeting experience so great that it leads to clumsily trying to recreate the past experience of novelty because that's all it can manage. But I do think the way he puts it is basically untrue, and that you can push nostalgia and memory pretty damn far in art without it remotely losing its luster. It's not just that works like the Aeneid are thematically about nostalgia and memory; a large part of their power is in the memory and nostalgia they evoke, in big things and in small details. Not that I have any desire whatsoever to see the new Ghostbusters movie; so I think you definitely have a point here. I mean, Vergil had to actually write a heroic epic; he couldn't just give us twelve books of our favorite Homeric epithets.

 

Overall, excellent, and it articulates a lot of what I hadn't been able to put my finger on. Ersatz is how I've felt about it, but I couldn't deny that I was superficially entertained during it.


I'm (also) in the pro-Finn camp, even though the criticisms of how he is unpackaged within the plot are salient. I don't mind the Millennial humour and I don't mind the schizo aspects of the character even though they are typically no-nos; I think it's mostly Boyega skill, and also the fact that it's one of the few genuinely fresh things in the film on a saga level; a character who is pure speculation in everything that he does. As for defining him, I would say that he is defined and driven by misguided chivalry in most of his actions - the "departure" at Maz's castle is twaddle though and it's the only post-Niima bit where his choices aren't defined by his adoration for Rey.

I'm not sure what he's saying in terms of the brief "refusal of the call" in ANH - it takes a bit longer by my reckoning: the call is Obi-Wan telling Luke to come to Alderaan and learn the ways of the Force, but the acceptance is Luke returning to the homestead (one of the few "clever" callbacks in TFA is using the music from the burning homestead when Rey FINALLY accepts the call during the friggin' climax)

But yes, I'm totally with him on how inconsequential the and "assembled" the action is, it tumbles through from piece to piece without escalation or undulation and so each piece is disposable. I remember first seeing it and this unease sitting in with the pretty lame Han/Kanjiklub/Glaswegian negotiation, it's all random... stuff just chucked in. Han is smuggling (interestingly the first time we see this; should be better) and we've got a monster sequence... because. In the previous films we have:

• Dianoga - because they had to escape through the garbage chute and even though it's weird there's a monster in there, the reason for them being in there makes perfect sense
• Wampa - Luke has against his advice ventured off the designated path
• Space slug - They're hiding and it looks like a cave
• Rancor - it's a pet
• Sarlacc - Jabba's a sicko and loves watching people suffer - well established already in the rest of the film, and would have been only with the revelation that he's kept Han in the carbonite
• The big horrible fish in Naboo - they're going through the most dangerous path that no one else dares venture through
• Acklay/Reek/Julia Roberts - it's a public Roman-style execution
• NB: the only monster in ROTS is democracy amirite

I love that he pointed out the ping ponging of the characters... as much as I genuinely do love Kylo Ren and Driver's characterisation, his two mistakes are tenuous. He puts Poe back on the Finalizer because... hmm. He does not continue to investigate on Jakku because... hmm. He's satisfied with capturing Rey rather than finding BB-8 because... err... she's seen the map. I mean, I've seen a map of Russia but I wouldn't necessarily be volunteering my services as a navigator without the reference material. Unless he can actually extract specific imagery from peoples minds? Can he do that? Who would know? When Vader makes errors they are understandable - he is either outplayed or we have an understanding that he is taking a risk (such as his attack on the Tantive IV - dialogue demonstrates that he is chancing his arm)
I do disagree on his praise of Abrams' visual style over Lucas's - Lucas's films are actually painfully easy to watch and this was the point - there are no hard cuts, nothing ever overly active in terms of the camera, the moves are more subtle and Lucas favours tableaus. Abrams however just works from the Spielberg playbook without really understanding how it works. He mixes Spielberg's proclivity for pans and dollies with heavy cutting, and as a result you get something quite jarring by comparison to the other 6 films.
I'm so glad he pulled apart how badly the film establishes the political situation and the overall state of play. It's actually my biggest issue with the piece - it feels crushingly tiny compared to the other films even though sure, more planets get blown up. The other films you understood why this was the story being told; with this one you get the oddest feeling that there are more interesting things happening elsewhere.

I will disagree with him on the Han Solo death the lighting and staging of it are excellent albeit obvious and I thought they did as good a job as was logistically possible to establish the relationship, and I think actually volumes are conveyed with the way Ford delivers "Ben!". So much of this film is reliant on the actors and what they do which is certainly interesting, but on the whole not enough.

 

Anyone who made it through that spew deserves a medal. Some good points. I think most will stipulate TFA wasn't perfect or particularly close to it, and that movies generally don't benefit from time and repeated viewings.

 

...Even if what you say is in face the case, to add in a possible silver lining:

"Once I hit this one out of the park for Disney I'm getting $50 million to make my dream original sci-fi film!"

Either way the movie going audience will be getting one great movie.

 

...and then he'll strap the 50 million in gold Disney gives him to his body, go back in time and make Looper. Genius.

 

Who would say that? Because it would be a patently absurd thing to say.

 

Everything J.J. tells you is a lie.

 

I'd say it's a heavily exaggerated thing to say, but in a general sense it is easier to spot plot holes and the like on a second viewing.

 

More importantly, "the magic" of the first time you see a movie is slowly (or quickly) fading away; maybe because it relies on surprise or suspense that simply isn't there anymore once you've seen the story often enough; or because you yourself change and don't really love the same things anymore that you did when you were younger/in different circumstances.

Doesn't have to happen and doesn't have to be noticable, every viewer is a different person. There will be people who can see any SW movie, especially Ep7, time and time again and always have a great time; and there will be people who realize that once the effect of Abrams' faster, more intense way of presenting scenes (which is currently a bit of a blockbuster thing in general) wears off, they don't have a great time anymore. And those are the people the film critic Hulk is talking about. He's not talking about the people who enjoy getting what they enjoy when watching a blockbuster like Ep7.