I would buy/watch a Bluray extended cut of this movie that fleshes stuff out more like the LotR movies. I hope it happens.
Oh yah Reggae/Ska is now Star Wars Canon.
I can only hope she has a better showing in that!
Apparently JJ Abrams and the guy from Hamilton co-wrote the Cantina music.
millions of good-at-everything male characters in media but one female one and we have A Problem
if harrison ford was bored what does harrison ford excited-to-be-here look like cause I donât think Iâve ever seen that movie.
I thought it was pretty good except the tie fighter battle at the end was somehow the most boring one out of all the films, and they brought in the guys from The Raid just to get killed by a cgi monster.
my favorite character was the storm trooper vested up with the mag pouches
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crossposting from facebook because why not
- the new cast is generally really good. carrie fisher clearly hasnât acted in years to a point that I almost feel bad that she had to be in this movie because her memoirs and stage show were so good, and I think mark hamillâs one stage direction was âlook at the camera like you just walked out of your house in the morning and someone hit your car.â also, admiral ackbar may have been a mistake.
- the space battles are still super duper compelling though Iâm surprised that they sort of whiffed the last one, like they were in such a hurry to get to the second movie they couldnât bother giving this one a climactic finish.
- the implied politics, such as they are, have gotten kind of weird/rightist by this point â like, apparently in the star wars universe, any power vacuum leads relatively quickly to outright fascism, and jedi powers are exclusively inherited through might-as-well-be-royal lineages?
- the pacing, which was the one thing they really had to get right if they were doing a too-faithful homage to the first movie, was great. and thatâs pretty impressive seeing as theyâve been failing to do a too-faithful homage to the first movie since 1983 and they finally more or less nailed it. Iâd like to have something to say about how this one seems so competent as to have been inevitable yet that seems strange in the context of the terrible prequel trilogy only ten years ago, but I donât know what Iâm reaching at.
- that was my first time wearing 3D glasses and it took like 90 minutes before I was comfortable moving my head more than like one degree away from the screen.
I wish I could go back in time to last week when I didnât know what a Mary Sue was.
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yeah not really any great action sequences, which was weird. hated, particularly, the whole tentacle monster hallway scene, i think. maybe the characters were actually cool, i donât know. i thought adam driver was great, but maybe i just love adam driver. seriously donât know how some of the writing was so boneheaded - han and leia talking about losing their son, in particular. âi did one thing.â âI did a different thing.â âyes. i guess we both handled it in different ways.â are you kidding?
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I almost felt like the movie not having any genuine outer space dogfights was kind of a way render unto Lucas the things that are Lucasâs. I mean itâs one feature that was executed pretty excellently in all of the other sw movies. A lot of the action sequences in this actually seemed kind of reminiscent of action scenes in other JJ Abrams movies. Doesnât give me a lot of hope for the action scenes in the next two, based on those directorsâŚ
Looper shoots/stages one of its small action scenes (young lead getting out of his apartment) solidly. I donât think weâve seen enough Action from Johnson to pass judgement on what heâll do with a bigger canvas.
Jurassic World guy suggest vaguely solid but meh in strong Abrams tradition.
Yeah, I was fully underwhelmed by Jurassic World. Honestly I think that is probably the most appropriate film of the year to compare TFA to, and in that case TFA is clearly better. JW basically just gets worse in my mind every time I think about it. The only action sequence I remember is the totally unnecessarily brutal killing of the nanny in front of the kids she was supposed to be taking care of, which was supposed to be funny because sheâs a bitch I guess?
Strange how the next two star wars directors have both done kind of off-kilter time travel movies. I really hope that is not some kind of a sign of things to come for Star Wars.
I hated Looper but have liked everything else Rian Johnson has done. At this point I donât know which big hollywood director I would entrust to make star warses, I guess it probably doesnât really matter. Just keep Whedon away.
EDIT: Youâre right though, the first half of Looper had some pretty good running around fighting stuff in it. I just hated the ending so much it makes it hard for me to remember those parts when I think of the movie.
Yeah, this was the first thing out of my mouth after we saw that movie. It was horrible. Like, especially so because sure, itâs a Monster film, but that scene is framed by a very PG amount of collateral damage among anonymous parkgoers (maybe one or two got picked up by Pterodactyls or something?) which makes it even worse thinking about it after the fact.
Jurassic World lacked any sense of atmosphere or tension. I canât believe anyone signed off on the color grading. The script was just lousy.
One can be snarky on Abrams, Johnson or Edwards, but they at least have some level of craft to their work that Trevorrow lacked in Jurassic World. One hopes that if Trevorrow doesnât have some massive leap that the DP and the rest of the crew can carry Episode 9.
I think one of the reasonâs itâs so gross is because, for better or worse, jurassic park movies kind of train you to root for the dinosaurs in some cases. Like, obviously sometimes characters you like have to die to raise the stakes or whatever, but it just felt like that scene was played as some kind of wish fulfillment or retribution or something, when it was totally uncalled for. The character was neither hatable enough for us to enjoy watching her die nor developed enough to really feel anything about her in particular, so lingering so long on the violence just seemed like wildly inappropriate.
I figured thatâs what you were getting at with your ironic rhetorical question about her portrayal, and yeah thatâs all true. She gets a death 4 times as graphic as Nedry or the lawyer dude who gets eaten without having âdone anythingâ.
Ah, Iâm glad. I felt the need to clarify just to make sure that it was understood the ironic rhetorical question was meant to be both ironic and rhetorical.
Thatâs a pretty extreme distortion of what I said. I never said there was A Problem in the way you reduced it, I just said it was lazy writing, & I never said that there wasnât a problem with good-at-everything male characters, so thatâs a bad assumption on your part.
As the review points out, Luke Skywalker who is clearly the character they have based Rey on, was a bumbling idiot throughout most of the series, especially in ANH. There was a sense of a journey (you might call it a⌠Heroâs Journey) where he learned from his mistakes and bettered himself along the way. Rey is just super good at everything immediately. Seriously did she make one mistake the entire film? Consequently there wasnât much tension. And in addition Iâm saying that maybe in the (male) filmmakersâ well-intentioned desire to write a SFCâ˘, they might have overdone it a bit & thus cheapened the result.
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I didnât think it cheapened anything, it was one of the things that was actually pretty interesting and new feeling about the movie. what rule is there that she has to bumble around and make mistakes? because luke skywalker did it? as if the movie wasnât a repeat of a new hope enough? would it have improved the movie so much more if she looked more scared during the tie fighter attack on the beginning? maybe the villain gets that arc for once and the teen goth vader fanboy is the bumbler whose going to become more competent over time. every michael mann film takes place in a what-if universe, what-if men where super competent and interesting, and nobody bats an eye or writes essays about Are They Too Good?? one female character in a star wars movie with a bunch of other main characters that was made purely to setup other movies though and we got to have think piece articles about it.
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Whatâs the deal with there only being X-wings and TIE fighters? Like, I mean, the major strategic mission was a bombing run, throw some Y-wings in there at least.
This, apart from Carrie Fisherâs real bad acting and the inevitable Major Character Death to Raise Stakes, was my major gripe with this fun movie.
Internet recess rumors: Snoke is Palpatineâs old master Darth Bubonic Plague, maybe as embodied ghost. Rey is Obi Wanâs granddaughter and maybe even also hear them out now Lukeâs daughter.
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the tentacle monster hallway scene seemed vaguely doctor who. wasnât bad but that + the last bit on not-tatooine right before that felt like it had a different director from the rest of the movie.