PT PT Forum - TFA: Discussing the FILM (characters, plotlines) - Spoilers Allowed

I thought this was interesting: I found it in one of the speculation threads from before the film was released. Someone nailed it pretty well and another person also nailed the ramifications of it.

Those are some serious thoughts to consider. I've seen people bend over backwards to make sure Han and Leia are not blameworthy at all. It appears canon is now doing this as well with Bloodlines, which I hear suggests that Snoke manipulated Kylo since basically his birth. This leaves us with basically two options to evaluate Han and Leia's role as parents: they were either extremely negligent (allowing Snoke access to Kylo since childhood, not detecting this) or they were just bad parents who caused a stormy Kylo childhood. Either of these two possibilities results in a dark evaluation of Han and Leia's parentage. People make their own choices, that's true. But it seems that Kylo was spoonfed all this nonsense from Snoke from an early age, so what choice is there? And even if there is a choice Kylo made, we know from the other films that childhood strongly influences what happens later. Padme and Luke were raised in stable homes. We can see how that turned out; they reject evil when it is presented to them. Others, like Han and Leia, grow into that position through good influences around them. What about Kylo? Are we to believe that his upbringing had no influence on him? There is just no way to escape making Han and Leia look bad here. And TFA certainly doesn't give us any reason to think they are outstanding parents. And Luke is still presented as a failure, hiding away from his responsibilities in the galaxy. And the New Republic is presented as a failure. It just seems like so much failure everywhere on the part of people we look up to. I didn't know post-ROTJ was meant to be a tragedy, but it looks like the new writing team must have been inspired by Legacy of the Force....

 

Maybe you should learn the difference between HATE and DISLIKE. I said that Anakin DISLIKES being a slave. That means he doesn't LIKE it. I also said that the film didn't give me the impression that he HATED being a slave as his reactions are nowhere near that strong.

TFA makes it abundantly clear why Rey is still on Jakku, she is a pilot and it seems that she could have left earlier. But she didn't, she waited for her family to come and get her, which comes up when she finally does leave.

Compare Anakin, Luke and Rey in their first movies and ask yourself, who seemed the most happy with their life before they got swept up in an adventure?

To me, Anakin seemed by far the happiest. He gets to do things he loves doing, he lives with his loving mother in a nice house and they have enough food to feed guests. He doesn't like being a slave but suppose they were freed and Anakin could leave to go anywhere, would he? Not without his mother I think. And I think he could manage a good life for himself if he stayed.
Luke didn't have a very bad life, he had a home, relatives that cared about him and he had friends and could do flying in his spare time. But he wanted to leave, he felt confined and many of his friends had left. When Obi-Wan first gives him the chance to leave, he doesn't take it, he still has obligations to Owen and Beru. Only with their deaths does he finally leave.
Rey's life is very bleak, she lives alone, has very little food and has to scavenge every day just to have something to eat. But she doesn't want to leave, not because the place or any people there, but for people that she hoped would eventually come for her.

As I've said, he doesn't LIKE it, but not liking something doesn't have to mean you hate it.
He is crushed to leave his mother period, that she still is a slave is an extra burden sure.

The film shows Rey in the care of Unkar Plutt when she is left on Jakku, which I mentioned, and she has been inside the MF and knows what Unkar Plutt did with it. Even more suggestions that she worked/lived with him for some time.
So you think that Rey's crashed AT-AT is just as nice and cosy as Anakin's home in TPM?


And Tatooine has a civilization of sorts, there are cities and rulers of sorts that could step in and deal with situations. Jakku has tents and a few ramshackle houses and pretty much no rulers or any kind of order.
In short, while both places are harsh, Jakku is harsher.

Hardly, both Padme and the Jedi knew that Shmi was still a slave on Tatooine and both had the means to do something about it but choose not to. Ergo they left her to her fate.

I am not the one who argues that leaving Shmi as a slave is a good thing or that she had a better life as a slave than a freed person. But people have made those arguments to defend the Jedi/Padme and their inaction.

I would say that Anakin is neither the protagonist or main character in TPM.
He does the pod race, that is his big thing, then he just tags along for the most part and doesn't move the plot or story forward. He is just there until he gets in a position to save the day.
And this made the story very contrived as they bring a nine year old into a war zone for no reason and no one even comments about it.

Anakin in TPM is not in that "poor" condition, and nowhere near as poor as Rey. He has a pod that he could sell and they did sell it and got a lot of money for it. He has a house, plenty of food, friends and gets to do things he loves.
Part of what keeps Anakin in place is that he is a slave, he dies if he tried to leave. But he is also tied to his mother. If she left, he would go with her.
Anakin has someone, Rey only has a hope that someone will eventually come for her.

Well Leia is overpowered and taken captive and mind probed by Vader. Leia is hardly weak or timid.
But at least Rey isn't put in a very revealing costume or have her costume conveniently ripped to show off her midrift.

Well I disagree, his performances isn't as bad as some make it out to be but it is far from good.
At times it is serviceable and other times the delivery feels very fake or forced. He needed a better director.
And I've seen better acting from kids as young or even younger than Jake Lloyd.

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Really?
I've noticed that guys can be gun wielding fighting machines, that can take big beatings and are experts at everything and no one bats an eye. If a girl is like that, then some people comment and complain about "Feminism" and how it is unbelievable that a girl can do all this etc.
The trailer of Rouge One got complaints and people were already saying that the girl character is possibly another MS. Had the part been played by a guy, I doubt people would have called him a GS.

Bye for now.
Blackboard Monitor

 

Some of it is do to biological facts, such as women have less bone and muscle mass than men, of course that doesn't mean every man is stronger than every woman but on average men are built stronger and larger. The

Rey has a decent introduction, but the big issue with her is the fact she is too perfect, she is much more perfect than either young Anakin or Luke were, almost right away she is a perfect fighter, pilot, a better shot than stormtroopers, can speak droid and wookie perfectly, can use the force much more quickly than either Anakin or Luke did. The biggest Mary Sue aspect of her is that how she learned how to use force so quickly on her own in a few hours rather than the years it took for both Anakin and Luke to use the force at her level by the end of the film. Even Anakin was soundly defeated by a better trained and more experienced Dooku in AOTC, and Luke was also soundly defeated by his father in TESB who again had more training and experience. It took years for both to reach the level to defeat their opponents in a rematch. But Rey who had zero training or experience defeated somebody who had years of training and experience, that is textbook Mary Sue.

I think you are assuming Anakin just disliked being a slave, he was working on a scanner to find his implant, and having a bomb inside of you would cause psychological trauma. He did hate being a slave, but he was accustomed and grown somewhat numb to it, and even found some ways to take advantage of it like immunity from being beaten to death by Shebuba. Anakin and Shmi resemble house servant slaves in the South, they had it somewhat better than the field slaves, and their children were often the playmates of their owner's children, but it was hardly a ideal situation. At least with Anakin he was saved from that kind of life at a early enough age where he could still become a functioning adult. Rey on the other hand has had trauma for decades and is way too well adjusted and functional for someone in a situation like hers that lasted into early adulthood would be deeply disturbed and may even have signs of delayed maturity as psychological trauma and isolation can stall mental and physical growth in children. She should be similar to the feral boy that was found in France who couldn't talk and suffered stalled growth. He did learn to talk and even read but suffered many health issues and died at 43 I believe.

As for bringing Anakin into a war zone, where was Qui-Gon supposed to do with Anakin? The Jedi weren't going to take care of him, leaving him on the Queen's ship would have got him captured as Nute tells Sids they found the Royal ship abandoned. In the American Civil War there were 10 year old drummer boys on the battlefields. There is one line from Qui-Gon who told Anakin to careful watch what he does, which indicates Qui was unofficially teaching Anakin.

Both Leia and Padme aren't molested while tied to a chair like Rey was. Also Jakku has a police force which are in deleted scenes, Tatooine doesn't have a police force, it is ran by gangsters. Lucas said the stromtroopers are only on Tatooine looking for the droids, normally there isn't a imperial presence there.

Padme could not engage in illegal slave buying even for the purpose of freeing (when it came public there would be charges why didn't she buy more and free slaves? where would the freed slaves go and how would they live? would they require government support off the taxpayers backss?, etc), nor could the Jedi as Tatooine wasn't part of the Republic and is under Hutt control, out of their jurisdiction. People who make the argument that Shimi was abandoned are switching the truth to create a nonproplem to complain about.


Also noticed how Star Killer Base looks an awful alot like Unicron from the Transformers animated movie.






Starkiller Base eats stars and destroys planets, Unicron eats stars and planets thus destroying them, Unicron should sue!

 

The word itself is not a very nice word at all. It's rancid when you begin to look over its very history in human civilisation. 'Slave'.
Now obviously Star Wars is not some sort of social commentary, but labelling a carefree kid who runs around exclaiming 'yipee', isn't starving, lives with mum in moderately comfortable surroundings, builds mechanical things freely etc as a slave, diminishes the sense of human hardship associated with it. Prisoners would've been more apt

 

How slaves have been treated has varied widely throughout history. Plenty of cultures have treated slaves in a relatively humane fashion compared to, say,the type of plantation slavery practiced in the South, a particularly vile system. In ancient Rome domestic slaves were often treated quite well, could earn their own money, and were often granted freedom after some years of service. But none of that can really make the concept of slavery any more palatable or take away the fundamental indignity someone trapped in such a system must feel from being "owned" by another person. We see this in how defensive Anakin is when Padme learns he is a slave. The idea that someone isn't a "real" slave if they're not starving and have a decent place to live is just wrong.

 

It doesn't make sense to starve slaves either, as Heston said in the Ten Commandments,

Watto may have treated his slaves well because they were "assets" that he wanted to perform at optimum and not deprecate, like oiling and greasing a machine, not out of pure kindness.

 

I was reading some of the spoilers about Bloodline and they were painful to read. Like you mention, the intention seems to be to minimise the blame on Leia, Han and Luke, but the spoilers had the opposite effect on me: I feel that if one does not learn from mistakes of the past that one is aware of, then it serves one right if things go wrong again, and so it's difficult to me to feel sorry for the older generation of good guys for the situation that they are in at the beginning of TFA.

Spoiler

What should I say when Leia and Luke repeat exactly the kind of mistake that contributed to Anakin's turn to the dark side and almost prevented Luke from redeeming his father... Seriously? Of all the things not to learn from?

 

guess who's back?

 

Now I want the rest of the trilogy to be a Star Wars/Transformers crossover! Unicron eats worlds where the Force is exceptionally strong to get more power and the Millennium Falcon turns out to actually be Optimus Prime whose plan is to stop him.

 

And Hayden gets to be a Starscream FG who betrays Ian Megatron in order to save Spike Binks and the Dinowooks from Luke Shockwave.

 

More like the Unicron design took inspiration from the Death Stars of the OT. Probably why Unicron hasn't sued.

 

Comparisons to the PT, OT, G1 or any other Transformers media is acceptable in this thread.