The timing was off. The humor was out of place and not really star wars. Overall it felt like it was infused with “modern” sensibilities a bit too much. This was JJ Abrams presents Star Wars. Really not sure how else to put it.
i had a good time . . . ate a bunch of popcorn [blows huge red bull vapecloud]
brought a ziploc bag of peanut butter cookies and another ziploc bag containing two cherry coke zeros and two diet barqs and consumed the lot before threepio showed up
yeah
[gene shalit voice] if this is a new hope, i can’t wait to see the empire strike back[/gene shalit voice]
[/firstpost]
wb
hi tim
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I’m going to see this again in IMAX 3D, then again in IMAX LASER. Then probably never again.
I really liked how much of the story was being told without any dialogue. Oh, and that The Force was back to being portrayed as more of a general meditation or faith-based kind of thing, instead of energy-binding blood worms or whatever.
I had a decent enough time, but I think it’s my least favorite of the Star Wars. I guess I turned into a prequel apologist at some point?
I haven’t seen Harrison Ford in a movie in a while, I love Harrison Ford.
I just saw it in IMAX DMR 70mm and only the Jakku escape scene was in 1:43:1. Many shots could have benefited from and been easily converted to the taller aspect ratio: the opening crawl, any shot of space that is entirely CG, the wide shot of Rey finding the tessellated hanger on Star Killer, etc. It felt sorely underused considering how often they could have filled the full frame without necessarily shooting with 70mm cameras.
(Still a superior projection compared to the Sony DLP I saw the first time.)
you must have jedi-esque bladder control. if I so much as take a sip of cola during a movie I end up having to piss like three times before it’s over
I got a projector like six years ago now and since then I have been to a movie theatre about once a year because I really like pausing movies to go to the bathroom.
I do enough other stuff in my life to act more pro-social but this one is a pretty clear deal.
Speaking of that kind of thing, I missed the part where Kylo Ren talks to Darth Vader’s helmet because I was in the bathroom. I just assumed that shot in the trailers was cut from the actual movie until I was told otherwise.
i agree with a lot of the review that was posted… i felt the first half was significantly better than the second; once jj abrams got to jj abrams-ing the place up, the movie stopped feeling like star wars and started feeling like jj-abrams-latest-whizz-bang-extravaganza. i recall much of episode 6 being similarly vacuous action but heck the millennium falcon sequence on jakku was legitimately gripping (spaceship physics aside) while the late stage action was largely going through the motions.
real lack of emotional hits for key moments: fin meeting back up with poe, for example. it wasn’t a lack of dialogue; in that scene, fin and poe have a big ol manhug and a lot of “i thought you were dead!” rather, the fact that poe was missing (presumed dead, tho telegraphed to the extreme) had no real weight to it; the narrative chugged along appreciably without him. in fact, i felt like the dialogue+cinematography was more greatly calculated to create pathos than anywhere in the original trilogy. the fact that it largely failed to create that kind of emotion is a bit disappointing.
star wars has always been a sort of broad-strokes blockbuster grand adventure sort of franchise, in its best moments. it feels like this movie would have needed another 45 minutes to accomplish that. it’s strange that the second half of the movie feels as stretched as it does and yet the last 5 minutes so oddly compressed. the story beats of ‘finding luke’ ‘reactivating R2D2’ ‘han’s death’ all deserve more meat than they are given at the end of this film.
it’s also worth noting, having rewatched empire strikes back a couple days ago, that that movie gave its characters significant room to breathe and be themselves. you saw darth vader walking around his ship doing vader things; you saw luke handstanding in a swamp trying to levitate rocks; you see han pottering around the falcon doing maintenance while parked on an asteroid. that gives the larger moments weight. i think abrams has a fundamental lack of understanding of weight in his directing; to him, every moment seems equally fraught with meaning, which cheapens all of them. this might also be why the first half of the movie, with its relatively stop-start action, flows more naturally than the latter half, which resembles a compressed soundwave, all level noise and no swells.
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also, major cosmopolitical missed opportunities/issues with
a) the new republic supporting a proxy insurgent group (‘the resistance’) against a separatist(?) group (‘the new order’) with no official support? what’s the deal? where is this new republic anyway? or was that all 5 of their planets that got destroyed?
b) they built another deathstar in 30 years? and it sucks up stars and is way bigger than the original? where did they get the time/people/money? major nerd issues i’m having with this
this is stuff that coulda/shoulda gone in the opening crawl! e.g. for the empire’s former territories to be split between new republic and first order (as the remnants of the empire’s bureaucratic/governance structure, it would make sense for them to aspire to be like their predecessors); and then for the republic to be sponsoring the resistance as an insurgent group that operates in first order territory.
I like this, agree.
On the other hand, I thought Poe’s re-introduction was actually pretty smart, in that until he reappeared I was actually strongly considering that hiring such a high profile actor for that role was just a really clever bit of sleight of hand, and that he really was going to stay dead. I was disappointed by this cos I like Oscar Isaac a lot, and was genuinely thrilled when he showed up again.
If they had really made a big deal about him being gone, and then brought him back, it would have felt a lot more gimmicky. But the way it was just made it seem like some misdirection–you think this movie is going to be about this dashing brilliant resistance pilot, when really it’s about this hapless confused ex stormtrooper who has no idea what’s going on… buuuut actually it’s about both of them. (and rey too obvs). I liked their friend-chemistry together a lot too.
hey so what happens when the star killer eats all the stars around it
does it have engines on the back to go somewhere else
gooooooooooooooood question
They get out some space-tugboats and tug some suns closer
kylo ren as spoiled teenager parody twitter kind of ruins my enjoyment of the film
kinda does the opposite for me, honestly
mostly i hate that everything has to immediately be assimilated into internet shithead meme culture immediately
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