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  1. In Memory of LAJ_FETT: Please share your remembrances and condolences HERE

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

Discussion in 'Literature' started by AdmiralNick22 , Dec 15, 2015.

  1. jamminjedi23

    jamminjedi23 Jedi Master star 5

    Registered:
    Feb 19, 2015

    Zeta I honestly think you're wasting your time in here. Just accept the fact that what you don't like is the same exact thing that most everyone else does like about the film. They liked how it brought back the fun of the OT again.
     
    Revanfan1 likes this.
  2. Gorefiend

    Gorefiend Chosen One star 5

    Registered:
    Oct 23, 2004
    Also they are both Star Wars movies D:
    Plus there are Leia, Han, Luke and Chewie D:=
    There is also the Falcon D:==
    etc.

    :p


    Whilst yes I found the homages a little too strong, the movie does enough stuff differently and also has enough unique things to still be worthwhile and that is coming from me who had so hope in this movie whatsoever.
     
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  3. Zeta1127

    Zeta1127 Jedi Grand Master star 5

    Registered:
    Sep 2, 2012
    Yeah, with everything different being what I don't like about the post-NJO.
     
  4. jamminjedi23

    jamminjedi23 Jedi Master star 5

    Registered:
    Feb 19, 2015
    Only thing I would have liked would be if they didn't add in the third Death Star. Overall it isn't that big of gripe because the new characters were so great and things got set up so well for the future.
     
    Rew likes this.
  5. Gorefiend

    Gorefiend Chosen One star 5

    Registered:
    Oct 23, 2004
    Though Kylo is already a better explained villain than Vader the Second ever became. Also the First Order already has more background then the Confed in LOTF ever got. :p


    Yeah felt really forced, though it is not even really a Death Star, but just a fortified planet with a special gun built on it.
     
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  6. jamminjedi23

    jamminjedi23 Jedi Master star 5

    Registered:
    Feb 19, 2015

    See Zeta that is the problem. People would take your arguments more seriously if you actually supported the EU. But you don't. You talk just as bitterly about the past ten years of the EU as you do the reboot.
     
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  7. Zeta1127

    Zeta1127 Jedi Grand Master star 5

    Registered:
    Sep 2, 2012
    I don't see that at all.
    I am sorry, but I can't speak very kindly about the past decade, when the main things going on, the post-NJO and TCW, go against everything I believe Star Wars stands for.
     
  8. StarLorrd

    StarLorrd Jedi Knight star 3

    Registered:
    Nov 18, 2014
    If Zeta had a dollar for every time someone had told him this he'd be able to finance his own personal Star Wars universe to do whatever he wants in and he'd finally be happy
     
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  9. Gorefiend

    Gorefiend Chosen One star 5

    Registered:
    Oct 23, 2004
    Yes you do you just don't want to :)
     
  10. Havac

    Havac Former Moderator star 7 VIP - Former Mod/RSA

    Registered:
    Sep 29, 2005
    Well, since the movie was a slave to nostalgia, I might as well engage in a little nostalgia of my own and indulge in the classic Good/Bad/Ugly format of the old TFN book reviews.

    The Good

    The cast immediately stands out as the best thing in the movie. The casting personnel did a tremendous job -- Oscar Isaac is a great talent, and he's a perfect fit as Poe Dameron. Daisy Ridley is a tremendous catch, a very talented young actress pulled straight out of drama school who handles the burden of leading a megablockbuster expertly. Boyega has a winning charm, though he's stuck in the worst role of the new heroes -- the cut-rate snarky-motormouth-millennial routine is just so gratingly out of place. Adam Driver had a massively **** role . . . and, I don't know, I'm not sure what any actor could have done with that material, but he didn't embarrass himself. Domhnall Gleeson is a really good actor. You wouldn't know it because General Hux was a joke, but he's a really good actor. Good job getting him. I feel bad for Andy Serkis getting stuck in these CGI roles; his role here as Generic Ominous Voice Attached to Generic Ominous Figure was particularly beneath his talents. The cast really ended up being an embarrassment of riches -- almost to the point of being literally embarrassing. They got Gwendoline Christie, who is totally awesome, and gave her an absolute nothing role. They got Miltos Yerolemou, and he just ended up being Man in Background of Bar Scene. They paid Max Von Sydow to look grave for two minutes of screentime. They hired the goddamn cast of The goddamn ****ing Raid and THEY JUST STOOD AROUND FOR A MINUTE. THE GODDAMN RAID PEOPLE.

    SERIOUSLY LOOK AT WHAT THESE PEOPLE CAN DO. LOOK AT IKO UWAIS.







    THEY HIRED THAT MOTHER****ER TO STAND IN THE BACKGROUND OF A DARK HALLWAY AND THEN RUN FROM A CGI BLOB FOR A MINUTE. THAT'S LIKE HIRING LEONARDO DA GODDAMN VINCI TO GLUE UP YOUR WALLPAPER.

    Anyway, yeah. Impressive new hires. And boy, was Harrison Ford great. He cared, he was having fun, it was a pleasure to see him on screen acting the hell out of Han Solo. He made me feel warm feelings. Chewie actually got used very well, even though I'm deeply confused about how the hell Han's been hanging out with the guy every minute of every day for some forty years and just now figured out that his bowcaster exists. Carrie Fisher sounded like she had been smoking a couple packs every day since ROTJ wrapped, but even croaking she was a warm presence who did the emotion very well and I look forward to seeing an expanded role for her in the sequels. Mark Hamill looked absolutely perfect, and that's really all you can say about him, other than that he did enigmatic emotion very well, at least for the first couple minutes, but after about eighteen minutes of Luke and Rey gaping wordlessly at each other while she shakes a lightsaber at him, you had to think he was just wondering why the hell Abrams hadn't cut already.

    Other good things were, well, I liked the choice of settings. Nice locations. Fresh looks for the series, bargain-basement Tatooine Jakku excepted. And I thought the staging for the big Han-Ben confrontation was fairly striking. It tried a little too hard, especially considering the film hadn't earned the gravitas it was trying to deploy, but it showed an actual eye for visuals. And seriously, Oscar Isaac. I love that guy. He's very good at this acting thing.

    The Bad

    I hated every second of this movie. From the uncanny valley feeling of the opening crawl to JJ Abrams' utterly inept handling of the closing scene, I hated this movie. It was a soulless, joyless exercise in nostalgic simulacra from a director utterly unsuited to the material.

    I realize that I scoffed at the revealed plotline and I make fun of how awful Troy Denning books are so everyone's going to assume that I just hate everything and went into this wanting to hate it, but honestly, I wanted to believe. I had no great expectations, but I wanted to be pleasantly surprised. I was willing to be pleasantly surprised. I figured I'd probably have issues with the script, but I knew I'd love the cast and was hoping for at least the feeling the better trailers gave me -- striking visuals, Star Wars music, that feeling in the soul of having experienced Star Wars. I could quibble with some of the choices made but enjoy the ride, like the characters, marvel at X-wings and lightsabers, walk out genuinely excited to see the far more talented Rian Johnson take the baton and run. I wasn't writing anything off. I wanted to like this so badly.

    I left the theater with only one positive feeling: a renewed appreciation of just how truly great the original trilogy was, and even a new appreciation for the prequels. They're not good movies, not really. But The Force Awakens makes The Phantom Menace look like The goddamn Lion in Winter. George Lucas is no Marty Scorsese, but he's a very good director. Yeah, Old Lucas's scriptwriting and storytelling skills have certainly faltered and he was never a great actor's director, but he's a deeply underrated visual stylist and a keen storyteller. Even at reduced form in the prequels, he throws into contrast just how poorly constructed this film's world is. George Lucas, whatever else he might be, is a goddamn film scholar. He's spent a lifetime studying film. He's deeply influenced by a variety of sources. He's absorbed an incredible amount about how to tell a story in the film medium, how to frame an image, how to convey an idea on camera. And he's able to take those influences, process them, and put out something with an incredibly distinct sensibility. Lucas is an incredible auteur, and even the films he didn't direct are imbued with his very distinctive touch.

    As a result, I spent the entire movie wondering if JJ Abrams had ever even seen a Star Wars movie. If his Star Trek movies were, as people have joked, an audition for the Star Wars job (they weren't -- watching Star Trek alone should have been enough for the responsible parties to realize he was utterly unqualified), then his actual Star Wars job was an audition for a Marvel job. Because that's what Abrams has made: a really mediocre Marvel movie with X-wings and lightsabers. It has nothing to do with the Star Wars saga. It didn't feel like a Star Wars movie at all. There was none of the old-school artistically-informed-pulp sensibility that's defined the series. No dignity, no gravitas. None of Lucas's talented composition. It was just pure, bland, run-of-the-mill choppy editing, action-obscuring camera movement that mistakes a kinetic camera for kinetic action . . . just no visual sensibility at all. This could have been anything. It could have been the next Thor movie. It could have been a Fast and Furious, except there weren't enough ass shots. But the one thing it never felt even close to was Star Wars. I mean, how do you watch six whole movies and not pick up at all on the visual grammar of the series? How can you call yourself a director, and watch those movies, and not learn anything about them? How can you come away from that thinking that the only thing to Star Wars is the Millennium Falcon and slapping the John Williams theme on footage of two people with lightsabers? Awww cool dudes look at those X-wings and how sick it is when those dudes with lightsabers fight Star Wars is the best!!!1!!! That's the only thing I can think. That this felt exactly like a fanfilm made by someone who thinks that the whole essence of Star Wars is to have spaceships and laser swords and look totally sick bro.

    There's such fetishization of the props and sets, to the point of the utterly baffling decision to remake Tatooine as a planet that looks exactly identical in every respect but arbitrarily is somewhere else (rather than, you know, designing a different desert planet that can even evoke Tatooine without looking like someone just didn't get the memo that this was another planet), but somehow Abrams has no ability to make this look like a Star Wars movie, to feel like it. Knock the prequels all you want, but Lucas's steady direction and competent composition grounded the CGI within the frame. Jar Jar might be obnoxious, but he's there. The CGI battles might not be as tangible as the OT's carefully photographed models, but they are tangible. But I don't care how much Abrams wants to brag about building practical sets -- this is the most awful-CGI-ridden Star Wars movie by far. The sets in the background might be real, but none of the action is. Blurry CGI whips around through the screen utterly ungrounded to any tangible reality. The best example has to be the baffling sequence on Han and Chewie's never-clearly-seen freighter. Whatever sins George Lucas is guilty of, indulging himself in narratively irrelevant sequences of indistinct CGI blobs chasing people through dark hallways is not one he's ever come near. In a mirror of the film's narrative structure, all the action sequences are just a muddle of things whipping around the screen without any visual storytelling, any sense of place or action.

    And it's not just the visuals (though I'll also point out that none of the new alien designs land, and the near-total absence of familiar species is deeply off-putting), but the sense of mythic gravitas. There's just nothing. The revelation that Ren is Han and Leia's son lands with a giant thud, totally bungled. There are no real moments of wonder, of joy. There's no sense of stakes, of that archetypal Campbellian monomyth tapping into something deep and fundamental. It's just a barrage of things happening and constant flippancy from characters who are so busy showing off their hilarious postmodern banter they forget to inhabit the universe they're in. There's no soul to it. Abrams has taken Star Wars and just drained all the spirit out of it, everything that makes it unique and not like any other blockbuster franchise, and in so doing turned it into just one more slick, empty, generic corporate money factory.

    The storytelling, too. Lucas knew how to construct a universe that felt deep, lived-in. Abrams . . . clearly doesn't. Lucas was able to paint the whole story of Empire and Rebellion with a scroll and Alec Guinness and some carefully chosen lines among the Imperial leadership. It was in media res but you immediately grasped everything. Here, people are dependent on a Visual Guide to try to make any sense of the plot. There's a Republic and a Resistance and an Empire and a First Order or maybe the Empire is the First Order but none of it gets spared a single line of dialogue. The first we learn anything about the superweapon is when Hux screams an incoherent speech and then all of a sudden, with absolutely no preamble, the weapon fires and obliterates "the Republic" by blowing up a planet we've never seen before. It's about as inept a handling of a plot point as I've ever seen. Even Troy Denning writes better than that. As Charles has pointed out, there's no downtime in which to build the universe. No time is spent on exposition, because lol exposition is stupid and it's why the prequels sucked rite lets just have fanboy lightsaber X-wing action and totally sick fights with stormtroopers brah.

    It's just remarkably poorly written, poorly constructed . . . it wasn't even bad enough to hate-watch and laugh at. It was just a joyless, soulless slog through clunky setpiece after clunky setpiece. Embarrassingly amateurish. I felt like I was watching the world's highest-budget fanfilm.

    The Ugly

    Well, we're now stuck with a universe in which Han and Leia had a kid who was, I guess, apparently just an awful person from the get-go? I mean, Abrams can't convey anything coherently but apparently he was just a bad seed from the beginning? So anyway, Han and Leia were awful parents and their child was a jerk. And Luke tried to build a Jedi Order but Han and Leia's son killed all of them because he wanted to be evil, so Luke decided to shrug and let evil have this one and wandered off to mope on top of a cliff. But hey, at least he left a map? Or a map existed independently? But anyway he gave it to Artoo right before Artoo went into a depression coma, except he cut a jigsaw piece out and gave it to Max Von Sydow as a thank-you for being Max Von Goddamn Sydow but being content to show up for a thankless bit part. And I guess nobody else has a map of the galaxy because the jigsaw piece can't be matched to anything else except the Empire has the map too but no one else in the galaxy does. Anyway, that's really beside the point here, though illustrative of the terrible writing I was talking about, because what's awful is that Luke has just taken off and given up. Plus, Han and Leia break up over how awful and terrible all the things that have happened after ROTJ are, and Han loses all the character growth he had throughout the entire trilogy.

    And now that the OT in general and ROTJ in specific have been thoroughly **** upon, we get a story in which Han manages to hug Leia once and then is murdered by his petulant son in some sort of adolescent tantrum about how Daaaaaaaaaad, you're embarrassing me in front of all my evil friends, and dies horribly without ever having been reunited with Luke, such that we will never even get to see Ford and Hamill interact in the sequel trilogy, because that might bring the audience too much genuine joy instead of just numbing them with more fanboy-approved X-wing action like what made the originals so totally hardcore bro.

    This movie is just such an ugly, joyless thing to do to the Star Wars universe. And all for the sake of a really hackneyed plot. I won't say it's worse than LOTF, but at least I had some fun reading LOTF. It at least had Allston going for it. This . . . barely offered a single moment of real pleasure. Rather than eye-rolling at how ineptly it was trying to push my pleasure buttons. I just came out of this feeling sad, disappointed, deflated. Not even sad at the events -- I have no trouble ignoring them. They have no effect on my Star Wars experience. If nothing else, this confirmed that I've definitely checked out of the new canon. I just felt really bad inside when I realized that kids were going to be growing up on this -- that they wouldn't have a chance to separate it out.

    I could go on even more, but really, this is too long already.

    In short, **** this movie. It was heartbreakingly awful.
     
  11. Havac

    Havac Former Moderator star 7 VIP - Former Mod/RSA

    Registered:
    Sep 29, 2005
    It was terrible at revisiting stuff, and it was part of the general problem of blatantly trying to push the OT buttons for fanboys as a substitute for being any good whatsoever at actually feeling like a part of the Star Wars saga.

    It's all, "Look, stormtroopers! Look, pseudo-Tatooine! Look, Star Destroyers! Look, Leia and officers sitting around a display at their hidden jungle base while their X-wings strike the Imperial superweapon to keep it from blowing up their secret base!" but it can't get any deeper into the real spirit of Star Wars than aping props and plot points.
     
  12. jamminjedi23

    jamminjedi23 Jedi Master star 5

    Registered:
    Feb 19, 2015
    Well Zeta that tells me that perhaps you need to find a different franchise to focus on.
     
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  13. Vthuil

    Vthuil Force Ghost star 5

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    Jan 3, 2013
    I wouldn't take him at all seriously either way.
     
  14. Gorefiend

    Gorefiend Chosen One star 5

    Registered:
    Oct 23, 2004

    Oh he is, somehow they just managed to compensate him enough by not letting him do even worse, like he usually does.

    Ah they can, you can split TFA as easily from the OT as the PT.

    And yep the film never reach the levels of the OT, but it is easily better written and certainly much, much, much better acted than AOTC and ROTS. And I certainly feel it is stronger than TMP (still the best of the PT movies btw :p ), just be the virtue of me only having to really ignore one scene (the as you also mentioned really pointless CGI monster scene on Hans new freighter), instead of larger parts of the movie, to enjoy it.
     
  15. Zeta1127

    Zeta1127 Jedi Grand Master star 5

    Registered:
    Sep 2, 2012
    Oh, so because I am a little bit pessimistic, I have no idea what I am talking about. I pretty much feel the same way Havac does, though not even I am that harsh about TFA.
     
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  16. Praenomen Cognomen

    Praenomen Cognomen Jedi Master star 4

    Registered:
    Mar 24, 2013

    (just quoting for posterity -- pretty certain I'll want to look back on this statement at some point in the future and laugh very hard about some deep cultural irony it represents -- never mind me!) [face_clown]
     
  17. Havac

    Havac Former Moderator star 7 VIP - Former Mod/RSA

    Registered:
    Sep 29, 2005

    Eh, you can choose to ignore it, but you can't really unsee it. I mean, I could choose to not care about the PT now, years after having grown up on it as a kid, but I couldn't not know that that was The Story -- could never entirely disentangle my notions of what the PT might be from what the PT was. I'm certainly never going to actually get a different story. These kids, all the poor damn nine-year-olds I saw in the theater, are going to grow up on this. It's going to be The Story for them. I had the chance to grow up on the NJO, thank god. They won't. This is where Star Wars goes, for them. Any attempt to think otherwise would involve a conscious, concentrated effort to disregard an established reality.
     
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  18. Nobody145

    Nobody145 Force Ghost star 5

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    Feb 9, 2007
    There's a line between homage and rip-off. Between referencing and just copying. I can understand other people's opinions, I just disagree with them, especially on the severity of the problems.

    Throwing together elements from all 3 OT movies just isn't enough for a good movie. Especially when logic was left out. And there has to be some rules, and we already have six films (and two TV series) establishing those rules. Oh look, Han leads a team to take down the shields protecting the superweapon so that the Rebels, er, Resistancers can attack said superweapon. Except that whereas on Endor the commando team had at least... ten people (it wasn't just Han, Leia, Luke, Chewie, Artoo and Threepio, there were at least another six extras), here its just Han, Chewie and Finn, as everybody else has to attend the Yavin Four Reenactment Play. Oh, and it turns out Finn was actually in Sanitation (so they had sanitation stormtroopers?).

    And turning off the shields requires getting the cylon, er, chrome girl to push a button.

    Its ok as a popcorn flick, summer blockbuster, but not much else. If Kylo actually turned back, that would have been a shock. Instead once the sun went out (does the sun recharge every few hours? as otherwise the planet should be in the dark already after the first shot), yeah, Han's dead. I-) Harrison Ford does great, the entire cast does great with what they have, but it doesn't redeem the film.

    Though sometimes I wonder if they recycled parts of nuTrek 2009 for the movie too (destroyed planet seen from another planet, random monster chase in the middle of the movie, etc.). Well, not really a surprise after Into Darkness ripped off as many scenes as they could from a much better older film too.
     
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  19. ifleninwasawizard

    ifleninwasawizard Jedi Master star 4

    Registered:
    Jun 2, 2014
    The rathtar scene is one of the places where this movie pushes all the wrong buttons. It tries way too hard to copy ANH. Han isn't only back to smuggling, but the fact that he is a smuggler is emphasized 10 times more than it is in ANH. Yet it also manages to feel like one of the least "star wars-y" scenes of the whole saga. The rathtars (and, though it's besides the point, Snoke) are what you would get if you asked for the most bland and generic CGI possible. It was strange to watch after the physical sets and puppets had been endlessly hyped.

    The whole sequence feels like it was a deleted scene that somehow accidentally ended up in the movie.
     
  20. Gorefiend

    Gorefiend Chosen One star 5

    Registered:
    Oct 23, 2004
    Sure but if you really do not like it, even as a kid (and it really is not that terrible that it will destroy their joy or taste in movies forever, unlike let us say Pixels :p) one will just ignore it like people do those utterly pointless Total Recall or Robocop Remake, or that new Terminator movie and still love the classics.

    Oh pretty sure they will also love the OT, if they do not already.

    So did I, not like it is gone, they can still get it, plus there are certainly are worse people for them a have as heros when growing up then Poe, Rey and Finn (which afaik you pointed out even you enjoyed :) ) or even better the cast of Rebels!

    But people are really good at that. :)

    It doess not eat the whole sun with each shot.

    He will have other duties as well when not out on missions.

    Was Star Wars really ever more than that though? At least for me much more joy in SW comes from the Background stuff and TFA is just as good at telling us that, "yes there is a really big galaxy out there with many, many, many more stories".
     
  21. Nobody145

    Nobody145 Force Ghost star 5

    Registered:
    Feb 9, 2007
    You know the sad thing? That image of Serkis with the motion-capture tech on his head we've all seen-

    [​IMG]

    I could have probably bought that as the villain, with the weird stuff and expression alone. Seeing him there with that intense expression on his face sells the menace pretty well. Palpatine was a malevolent presence in the prequels and OT with just some make-up. Instead, Snoke looks like... a giant holo-orc? That was another waste of a good actor.
     
  22. Zeta1127

    Zeta1127 Jedi Grand Master star 5

    Registered:
    Sep 2, 2012
    I already tried that, but it hasn't worked out over the years. Firefly got sabotaged from the beginning, with Serenity and the comics barely managing to be the last laugh. Stargate gets abandoned after the creators lose sight of what the fans loved about Stargate with Universe. Star Trek isn't even allowed to be Star Trek anymore. Tolkien's Legendarium has hit a rough patch with The Hobbit Trilogy. Star Wars has abandoned so much of what I loved about it in the matter of a decade. Defiance has just been canceled when it finally reached space. Halo is headed in an unwelcome direction. Harry Potter and The Elder Scrolls seem to be the only bright spots left.
     
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  23. Gorefiend

    Gorefiend Chosen One star 5

    Registered:
    Oct 23, 2004
    Biggest waste of an actor for SW ever will until the end of days be Brian Blessed as Boss Nass.
     
  24. Cheerios4u98

    Cheerios4u98 Jedi Knight star 3

    Registered:
    Mar 4, 2015
    I just feel like I was tricked into thinking I was going to get to see the "Big Three" share the screen together again after all these years. A huge part of the appeal of the movie was the fact that the original cast was all coming back for it. We had no reason to assume we would never see them actually interact with each other.

    Doesn't ruin the movie for me (I loved the movie), but it is my biggest complaint about it. An unforgivable flaw in my opinion. Could I have had just one scene with Han, Luke, and Leia all together? Just one? Is that really too much to ask?

    Apparently, yes.
     
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  25. Delta-7

    Delta-7 Jedi Grand Master star 3

    Registered:
    Apr 24, 2002
    Havac My friend and I were also disappointed that the Raid actors were given what was largely a small cameo, as we were both fans of the movies.

    My only hope is that I don't think either of them died on screen....so maybe they will be back in another movie to do more then stand in a hallway.
     
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