I like that new luke is a girl and light sabers feel cool again, and I appreciate that kylo ren is the first character in the history of star wars to be played by an actor who bothered to have a screen presence, but I dunno man this movie just kind of washes over me.
I guess it is perfectly millennial in that the movie doesn’t know how to be a new hope without being a new hope, which just makes it not a new hope. a new hope was a movie, ie the kind of thing hollywood is no longer capable of, while this movie exists more as a fan base than anything else. it is at least appropriate that this is about a bunch of characters who are unsure of how to exist outside the confines of their parentage.
No matter how much of this online twitterstorm clustershit I absorb, I will never, never be able to explain how this person of all persons engendered such bitter hatred.
I would say it’s because she’s boring. people can project the entirety of whatever they hate about feminism/diversity/peoplenotlikethem/peopleverymuchlikethembutalittledifferent/The World onto her. since she doesn’t actually have anything to say she can be a surrogate for some greater debate or whatever.
I saw this today and I liked it. With the prequels, the fun and interesting parts were somewhat overshadowed by annoying characters and writing. Not so this time, for me. I was okay with retreading elements of the first film, though you’d think they’d learn to stop building vulnerable Death Stars.
The only things that bothered me were
How so many things were in the right place at the right time (the droid, Finn, Rey, the Millennium Falcon, and Han Solo all converging the way they did, Luke’s light saber happening to be where they stopped, etc.) But that’s pretty standard in movies so I guess I can’t hold that against it too much. Maybe The Force is supposed to be able to somehow manipulate the universe to maintain “balance.”
As others have mentioned, that Rey seemed to know and master various Jedi tricks without any training. I guess it makes sense that she picked up on some of it when Kylo Ren invaded her mind, but his offer to teach her made me think of the contrast with Luke struggling to focus and develop his skills.
At first I thought it strange that both Finn and Rey were competent enough with a light saber to hold off Kylo Ren, injured or not. But Stormtroopers obviously have combat training and Rey exhibited skill with a staff earlier from training that may eventually be explained. And I guess it’s not clear how much training or practice Ren has had.
Though I’d avoided trailers, Han Solo’s death was spoiled for me in a random unrelated forum post somewhere. But I don’t think that really diminished my experience. I’d been curious to see what those guys from The Raid would be doing in the film. Not much, it turns out, other than serving as a distraction to me with their familiarity.
I am late to the party and finally saw this today. That first act (more or less everything until the freighter) was pretty rough going, but the rest was really solid. My major complaint about that first act is that it felt like J.J. was smashing together A New Hope and Nausicaa, like he was unsure about what exactly to do so he used other films as a setup. Even though you can argue that the rest of the plot is like a loose revisit to ANH, I think it finds its own footing.
Like anyone who waited this long and also uses the internet, Han’s death was spoiled for me but honestly, that kind of felt like a minor thing since it’s not really his story anymore and everyone never bothered to spoil the rest of the movie. With that said, seeing Chewie alone made me sad.
Also, let me talk about how J.J. and whomever storyboarded this thing need to be kept away from visual metaphors. And also how Ren is a shitty Sith who gets hit by a fucking stormtrooper when fighting Finn. Also, is “wisened old black lady” a new archetype that I missed or what.
Now that I’m actually reading the thread instead of shooting off random thoughts, I don’t get how people are calling the space combat good. Like, taken in a vacuum, it looks good, but compared to the OT, it feels like comparing the saber duels from the OT to the ones in the prequels: more technically advanced and more complex choreography, but the complexity takes away from how clean it looks. In the OT, the space combat was always shot in such a manner where most of the time, space and relation to objects was mostly implied but made sense because of the editing. In TFA, there’s a ton of follow shots that twist and turn with flight paths that make things seem smaller and tighter. Granted, there’s a central objective so the engagement space is smaller, but they could have shot this wider since it never really feels you’re getting an idea of the action (you don’t have an idea of how many X-Wings are shot down until someone explicitly says so). Pretty much the only real detail is that they are vastly outnumbered. Also the trench run was worse.
I’m probably just being a curmudgeon with my opinion now but I liked the WWII-style dogfights the OT traded in
I think that holds if you’re comparing TFA to ANH - the Death Star sequence is shots of a couple of craft at a time strung together with cockpit and Yavin base shots. RotJ’s space combat and ESB’s asteroid field maneuvers however are more in the vein of TFA. Busy, disorienting shifts of the horizon and It’s So Dense are not new w/r/t space combat in Star Wars.
I am a baby and got choked up at how overwhelming the X-wing fights are on an IMAX some though, so ehhh.
Yes, I was kind of hoping for more variety in the ships, and maybe some interesting new designs. In part because I’ve been playing the X-Wing miniatures game a little lately after a friend introduced me to it.
One thing I couldn’t help thinking due to the timing of this film is that I liked it but it was no Mad Max: Fury Road. I think Mad Max has become the Dark Souls of recent movies in this way for me. I watched it for the fourth time last week with a friend who hadn’t seen it yet.
