ST The Force Awakens vs The Last Jedi

Which one ultimately satisfied you more as both a Star Wars fan, but also a fan of cinema?

Mostly in terms how characters were portayed, how action sequences went

What kind of direction style appealed to you more?

 

TFA all the way for me.

 

I'm not the biggest TFA fan but it wins all day everyday when compared to TLJ.
TLJ is an absolute abomination... i honesty never thought it possible that such a terrible Star Wars movie could be made.
Almost 12 months down the line I'm still flabbergasted it was allowed to happen.

 

TLJ.

When I remember all those plot holes from TFA, shots that look like a fan film, the way the movie shrinked the GFFA and pointless return to ANH in a situation of endless possibilities... Oh, God!

TLJ isn't on a PT/OT/spin-offs level, but it does offer some intriguing story threads and is visually more appealing than TFA.

 

I much prefer the Force Awakens and think it is more than just ANH rehash. The end assault with the X-Wings was the only time I ever thought that. It is very well done imo. It's my 6th favorite after the OT, RO, and ROTS.

 

TLJ for me by a wide margin.

 

I love both, but I'm going to give it to The Last Jedi. I think The Force Awakens is a more fun movie to watch (I've called it "pure joy in a movie" on here more than once), but I find The Last Jedi has the most thematic depth and breadth of any other film in the series. It also just works for me. There's a lot of peculiar tonal choices, and a lot of ways in which things are shot in an "un-Star Warsy" manner, which work like absolute gangbusters for me, but I can fully understand why they'd have the opposite effect on other people. But everything, including and especially the characterizations and story choices, just... work for me. I enjoy it more with every viewing, and it's probably my second favorite in the series right under The Empire Strikes Back (although my ranking changes practically every week so that's subject to change).

 

Its an easy call for me because I outright dislike TLJ as a movie. But, TFA isn’t just the default winner here. I think Act I is actually really really good Star Wars, and the final lightsaber battle is one of my favorites in SW as well. TFA introduced a trio of new characters that I was very interested in and excited about. All three had a ton of potential and I couldn’t wait to see how they developed. I think that should be the goal of the first in a trilogy. I also really enjoyed Poe as essentially Wedge with extra dialogue.

 

As a Star Wars fan: TFA

As a cinematic experience alone: TLJ

I wasn’t happy with either of them, but I still had a good time in my first viewing of either of these movies, and the experience was quite different. TFA did make touch my fangirl heart in many occasions. TLJ not so much, but it was beautifully filmed and had a rather strong, individual artistic expression that TFA lacked.

 

TFA no question. It's better written, better-paced, the characters are better/more believably characterize, it doesn't rely on everyone being morons just to move the plot forward, and it's just general a better put together and more entertaining film in general that doesn't rely on nonsensical "gotcha" storytelling.

TLJ, was a completely mess with incredibly shallow and poorly-executed "themes" which made it all the worse imo.

 

TFA all day every day. Yes it has a lot of ANH similarities, but it did also introduce new characters who had potential to be good. I particularly liked Finn and thought a stormtrooper with a conscience was a great idea that hadn’t been done in any way before.

TLJ either ignores TFA set ups or answers them badly in a very unclever way. The parent bit being a big problem for me. I don’t believe for a second, that the parent plot point in TFA was set up to be such dead end. Maybe that will be addressed in IX, but right now, TLJ has provided no cliff hanger of its own and destroyed most of what TFA set up. Finn has gone from being an interesting character, to being a joke. Like nearly everyone else.

Just imagine the boring space chase “plot” and the Resistance discover the hyperspace tracker is inside Finn. Rather than the silly hyperspace ramming scene, Finn could have jumped the Raddus to anywhere, leaving Resistance to escape to Crait. End the film there, with that cliffhanger of “where the hell has Finn gone, and can he be rescued?”. Have another cliffhanger for someone else too, and boy would I be stoked for IX. Instead we got what we got. As a middle chapter it’s a massive fail. As a stand-alone film, it’s boring.




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TFA for its engaging foreshadowing, nice set up of characters we should all come to love, and for its repeated and powerful use of cinematography to tell the story without words.

Both have their problems. TFA'S are simply far more forgivable.

 

TFA is a standard JJ NOPE and I am honestly baffled by people who find it fun. I know I enjoyed seeing Han and Leia broken up, Han’s life in ruins, their only child a dark lord who then kills Han with a lightsaber, a scene I had to see GIFs of hourly on Tumblr when the DVD came out. I thought it was a barrel of laughs to never see Luke, Han and Leia reunited. I can tell you it’s been a laugh riot to spend two years reading Kylostans calling Han and Leia terrible parents and seeing JJ and Larry get praised for their almost outright plagiarism of ANH combined with their total destruction of Luke, Han and Leia.

Then TLJ opens and it seems finally more people are getting that the ST is a cynical, soulless retread that actually had a couple of decent characters until Johnson finished them off too, along with trashing what was left of Leia, Chewie and the droids. What he did to Luke was appalling.

JJ nearly murdered Star Wars and Rian finished the job, buried the body and sewed the ground with salt. I can argue since Rian ignored most of TFA’s set up, he would have made the worst no matter what but JJ’s lack of a cohesive universe only made TLJ worse.

So, tie, I guess?

-Pro Edit

 

I don't understand how you're "baffled by people who find it fun," you seem to enjoy it a lot. I'm confused

 

The world is a confusing ball of huh..'wait what..?

 

Well, we wouldn’t want confusion...

The first bit of TFA with Finn and Rey was pretty good. I remember thinking well, JJ isn’t going to ruin this like ST 09. This is okay.

Then we get to the Falcon abandoned, to Kylo being Han and Leia’s only child, to that rathtar nonsense and Han being a terrible loser gone back to smuggling who won’t take a map to Luke to Leia, that awkward reunion scene, and I’m watching characters I love being destroyed. Leia references the Death Star while screaming at Han about not helping. Their goodbye scene is hideous in its “oh we always fought” when they didn’t after the midpoint of Empire. But whatever, who cares about character, we have Death Star 3.0 to blow up.

The one that can destroy planets millions of light years away while you can see the beams go by in the daylight sky on a third planet.

The one that Poe will blow up as if it’s nothing, then get denigrated in the next movie as if he’s done nothing, the way its destruction has no bearing on the plot of TLJ either.

I know everyone loves Rey getting the saber, but as a friend of mine noted, I’m too upset and angry about Han’s insulting, stupid death to care.

Then comes TLJ, which has so many detractors it’s okay to be against it. I welcome the company but you should have seen it coming. It was coming the moment JJ was hired. Anyone who saw what he did to Star Trek knew it. I guess it’s fashionable to see Johnson as the bad guy in all this but the groundwork was laid in TFA.

 

TFA by a large margin.

I wasn't very happy with everything after I first saw it, mostly because I felt that I had watched a remake of ANH in many of its parts, but I was ok with it. I was jokingly saying that if TLJ proved to be a great movie, then perhaps I would actually end up liking TFA even more, for setting up the second movie well. It turns out that I did indeed end up liking TFA more, but only because TLJ was unexpectedly bad for me.

 

Without a hearty, verbose explanation, I'd have to go with TLJ over TFA. However, I enjoy both films.

 

TLJ. It's mediocre but not as derivative and boring as TFA.

 

For me, both films were bad. In TFA, I didn’t like the basic retelling of a story that we already had seen in the earlier films. I didn’t like that Han and leia were estranged; that Han was killed; that the only new generation legacy character was a villainous, tantrum throwing brat; that there was no new Jedi order; and that Luke was only in the film for less than a minute. I did like the new characters of Rey, Poe, Finn, and BB 8.

But TLJ was far, far worse, because it has impacted the past films, making them pointless and irrelevant, and it has poisoned the future. It completely destroyed Luke’s character and changed the way a person becomes a Jedi to the silliest and most unsatisfying way possible, in my opinion. It not only ruined Luke, but it ruined the new characters for me too. I now actively dislike Rey, who was also changed into a different person, a weaker character, one with less agency, in order to serve kylo’s story. Finn was used pretty much for laughs, and Poe was changed into a wreckless, foolish guy who ended up being responsible for the deaths of most of the resistance forces. I don’t care about any of them anymore. It decimated the resistance to the point where there are now only 20 people left with one ship, no trained Jedi, and no Jedi masters.

I now can’t imagine a happy or satisfying ending to this 9 film story because of TLJ, and have no interest in what happens in the future. Too much has been torn down and nothing has been built up to take the place of what was lost. Even though I didn’t like TFA, I still had hope for future stories, and it didn’t destroy the OT films. After TLJ, both the past stories and the future stories have been profoundly negatively impacted to the point that I don’t see how Star Wars can be repaired.

 

For me it's easy. TFA reminded me of the ST. Didn't love every aspect of the story but it felt like Star Wars and I get the desire for soft-reboot due to Disney now in control.

TLJ did not feel like a Star Wars movie and whatever type of movie it is - I'm not a fan of.

 

The Force Awakens is better. That rubbing-your-hands-together anticipation for a set of new, wonderful Star Wars movies that add much to this already rich saga that I wanted with TPM in 1999 when I was not yet 20 and didn’t get, I finally got with TFA in 2015 when I was 36. I remember my mantra going in to TFA: “please be at least as good as ROTJ” which I thought was a reasonable expectation. I wasn’t wishing for the moon, I wasn’t saying please be better than TESB. That’s crazy. I doubt we’ll ever see a SW movie that could match up to that singular high bar of quality again. But man, TFA delighted me at every turn, bringing back those classic heroes of my childhood while also introducing me to some great new characters to invest in, most especially that good lady there in my avatar, now my favorite SW character. Also, beyond all the solid dramatic moments and strong action, TFA is for me the most fun SW movie since ROTJ. That combination of whiz-bang hold on to your seat joy and wonderment is here as it was back in 1977 when audiences were dazzled by this galaxy far, far away for the first time.

I’m definitely not saying TLJ doesn’t have these elements, it surely does. Plus I admire the risks that that film takes. But TFA just has more of these elements and utilizes them to fuller effect. It just WORKS, narratively speaking, and it never stops working.