Wake me when it's over.

This was the first movie I have seen, in decades, that I did not like.

Loved the actors for what they could with the material. The writing struck me as poor fan fiction.

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I mean, every scene struck me as a mash up of something from Episodes 4-6.

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Still better than episodes 1-3, and I know that the magic of the original episodes 4-6 can't be repeated, but my hopes were a little higher. Overall, I'm glad that I waited until it was in the second run theater and only cost me $4.

I'll take 1 over 7.

????

I will admit the movie has problems. I was watching it with my wife who hasn't seen 4-6 and the backstory crawl does very little to establish who you should be rooting for if you're not familiar with the movie.

In addition the first half of the movie trying to get everyone together and a plot going is...problematic. It basically is an elaborate rip off of Episode 4.

Poe Dameron (aka Princess Leia) holds critical information that he delivers to his droid BB-8 (aka R2-D2) to escape shortly before the big bad sith lord Kylo Ren (aka Darth Vader) captures her. Then the droid is recovered on Jakku (aka Tatooine) by a local rube/expert pilot Rey (aka Luke Skywalker). Rey then gets tangled up with con man Finn (aka Han Solo) and they escape impending First Order (aka Empire) entanglements on the Millennium Falcon (aka...yeah...).

So the entire 1st act is almost plot for plot rip off of Episode 4.

Now the second part is where the movie diverges. In Episode 4 you have the whole encounter on the death star but in this one Poe Dameron escapes on his own. Also you have the "cantina scene" after Rey and Finn (aka Luke and Han) are already together but yeah...the second act is a quasi-rehash of the REST of episode 4 that wasn't already cannibalized.

And then for the 3rd act, the assault on Starkiller Base (aka Death Star aka Starkiller was going to be Skywalker's original last name before being scavenged for the now non-canon Force Unleashed series...). This time the positions are a bit muddled as this is more ripped from Episode 6 battle of Endor. You have Poe Dameron (now either Luke Skywalker from Episode 4 or Lando/Wedge from Episode 6) assualting the exterior of the base in a fighter while a crack team of ground insurgents need to bring down the shields.

Again specific details diverge as the father/son dynamic is flipped for TFA where it is good Father trying to redeem Bad Son. and despite the "Death Star Desgin Motif" inside Starkiller Base overall this was one of the more original parts of the entire movie.


ALL IN ALL is The Force Awakens a great movie? Not even close. Will you like it if you've never seen a Star Wars movie? Meh...maybe but you'll probably find it VERY confusing. HOWEVER if you're  a fan of the original trilogy and feel violently ill at the prequel trilogy then TFA will feel like a breath of fresh air.

My hope is that this was baby steps in the right direction. It definitely stumbles but overall it is still a lot more coherent and fun then the prequel trilogy and because 75% of the movie is a remake of Episode 4, it captures the same feelings as Episode 4 which again was not a great movie but did ignite the passions and imaginations of several generations to follow.

TFA was not the hit like Marvel Movies were but I can understand being buried by anticipation and although I like J.J. Abrams he isn't the greatest at telling complicated stories (see Lost). However he does do an excellent job of harnessing joy and excitement in his movies so I'm optimistic that the next one will do a much better job, similar to how Episode 5 was vastly superior to Episode 4...

In reply to praguepride (msg # 83):

Not as elaborately put as you, but this was much of what I had explained to my wife on the way home after watching it.

Most of my issues came from, what I call, the J.J. Ambrams approach. Everything was sparks, flashes, and special effects BUT no real story. The original trilogy was way better without all the glam and glits BECAUSE it tried to tell a story rather than simply awe you with twisty flying X-wing scenes.

See, I think the original star wars also told a muddled story wrapped up in glitz and glam, but the difference being that the director didn't expect you to watch 3 movies prior to it.

Both do start like you're jumping into the middle of a television series mid-season (hence Episode 4 albeit that was a later addition to the mix...). As my wife pointed out for the beginning 1/3 of the movie she didn't know who was a good guy and who was supposed to be the bad guys until I clarified things.

In reply to Flarelord (msg # 78):

Droids wont tear your arms off. Wookies have been known to do that.

Seriously, I enjoyed this movie. I really did. I would have even been cool with the character of Rey being a super female badass lead character. Problem is, in their efforts to trip over themselves to gratuitously pander to a certain portion of the population (and not necessarily the one you think I'm talking about) they just took her too far. It's not that she had a lot of skills that bothers me. It's that she is evidently better than EVERYONE at EVERYTHING

I'm sorry.... she's an "ace pilot" good enough to outfly TWO experienced fighter pilots at the same time (the TIE fighters), and through the tight confines of a Star Destroyer reckage no less, where the TIE's smaller size gives them a decided advantage. She's an ace mechanic good enough to figure out how to fix Han Solo's ship faster than he does, that he's been flying and fixing for..... I dunno, a couple decades anyway, and she's only been on for about five minutes.

Then Han Solo gives her a gun, and she can't even figure out how it works. Three seconds later, she's a dead accurate shot. Sorry. Combat skills don't work that way. You can either operate the weapon, or you can't. Having been an operator of firearms for several years, I can tell you that the person who can't even figure out a safety catch isn't likely going to wow you with their shooting aptitude. Beginner's luck does happen, but not in the middle of a firefight.

Then she's fighting Kylo Ren, a guy who by all accounts is only partially trained as a Jedi. Sure, he's injured. That's a fair point. But you know what else he is? A lot better trained as a swordsman then Rey could ever be at this point. You could make the argument that Rey might have had some lightsaber training since she might be a former member of Jedi Camp. But let me clue you in on a little something: Combat is mostly muscle memory. That decays over time. You literally lose your fighting skills if you don't practice them regularly. Given the fact that Rey doesn't seem to remember any Jedi training she might have recieved prior to the start of the movie, it's likely that she hasn't been training in it for many many years. Perhaps more then a decade. A person who hasn't handled a sword in a decade isn't going to do very well against a person who has handled one almost every day for the same time period. That's just reality.

I was okay with her using the force for most of the things she did with it. I think they're setting her up to be Skywalker's daughter, so it makes sense for her to be extremely strong in the force. There are a few points, like when she mindtricks the stormtrooper, that just made me cringe though.

I loved the movie, and I would have enjoyed Rey if she wasn't just some Mary Sue. I think the writers really did the concept of a strong female lead a disservice when they wrote that character.

So this might be spoiler-ish, it might be just fan theory but here goes:


My prediction is that she is the love child between Luke Skywalker and the main character in upcoming Rogue One movie: Jyn Erso.

The idea is that yes, she is better at just about everything then everybody, just as Luke/Anakin was.

The mechanic issue can actually be hand waved within the context of the movie saying that she had very good knowledge of mechanics due to her jury rigging her own home and being a scavenger of an Imp star destroyer as her primary living. She knows what works and what doesn't.

The outflying the TIEs in the wreckage again can be explained that she flew through the same star destroyer that she has spent months/years navigating through for salvage purposes so she knew the layout inside and out. Even if the TIEs are smaller, knowing when the turns are happening and what's upcoming is far more important then size and agility.

As for the gun shooting and Kylo Ren fight, that is hand waved through the force where if she was really channeling the Skywalker line then anything is possible.

Not to be a total fan boy though, I hate how Jedi have been portrayed as being better at everything then anybody. In Episode 4 it was already established that Luke was a naturally hot shot pilot (like his father before him) but with the force it gave him that extra nudge.

For the most part that was how it worked, he was already a good action hero but the force lets him push the limits. Then came the prequels where you have Obi-Wan who profoundly is anti-blaster, anti-starship being an ace pilot and crackshot with a blaster that he never uses just because the force flows through him.

I would have rather they dial it back and make it more subtle which is (one of many reasons) why the original trilogy was so much better.

I would have rather they make her useless with a blaster because that would not only be a flaw in an otherwise Mary Sue-ish character but would also be a hilarious call back they could use for the rest of the trilogy where everyone makes fun of the fact that the Jedi warrior and legacy of Luke can't hit the broadside of a barn.

I think you hit the nail on the head though that they overcompensated a little for the general perception of lack of female agency in Star Wars movies but on the grand scheme of things I'd rather they swing this way then perpetuate bad stereotypes.

Life is a pendulum and it can be hard to find that perfect balance without swinging to the extreme both ways a few times.

I have already made a long post about force awakens (on my occasional blog). There were many many things I liked about it, and I see enormous potential here, it is all about what happens next, the characters will either break through to their potential and the movies will be great, or they won't, and it will be forgettable. Please note I do not mean dbz style power levels as potential

TFA is a movie you watch for entertainment. If you try to analyse it even a little, the plot holes appear.

For example:

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There is a great complex plan to blow up the super death star. The rescue team avoids the planetary shield by emerging from light speed inside the atmosphere... OK

So why can't they radio when the rescue has happened. Then a single x wing with a droid pilot can do the same trick and ... Overshoot a little bit. We saw the damage in Russia last year when a meteor exploded above one of their cities, and that was sub light speed. An x wing masses much less than the falcon, so the field anomalies will be that much easier for it to exploit.

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Using hyperspace as a weapon is a big no no in the star wars universe. There is evidence to support that it causes incredible damage but most writers skirt around it as a big no-no. Star Trek is the same way, you could propel bombs at Klingons at warp speed but there are usually two theories

1) It won't work the way you want. The extreme gravity of the planet disrupts warp space and saps you of your extreme momentum before you hit, and then you just hit the ground.

2) It's considered a war crime and is banned by all that is good and right. One of the few things even the sith won't cross because...reasons...

I never said they were good reasons :P

The moratorium on doing it is a good reason, however you are attacking a huge military target that has a minimum (imho zero) chance of civilian casualties, that has just given all that's good and true a huge kick in the teeth.

Rather than dwell on this further, here is another possibility, based on three bits of possible evidence. Military technology on the alliance side devolved or remained static. Possibly the Order has as well, but I prefer to think the order's capability advanced.

The first piece of evidence is Kylo Ren's Showpiece of freezing the blaster bolt in midair.  This was supposed to set him up as powerful, but my impression of that didn't last the rest of the film. So. This means there was more than just the light/energy for him to effect, possibly a physical component suggesting the technology of the alliance has stood still.

Why couldn't the X wing pull off the force field trick?  The millenium falcon was heavily modified and based on old tech.  The new X wings weren't capable of it. suggesting a focus on other matters than military spending.

Where was the alliance fleet? Possibly when luke announced his new jedi academy people started beating their swords into plough shares believing the jedi would be what they were before the empire.  The weapons contractors then went off to the Order.

I was going to say the RoJ endor forcefield was stronger than the one used for the super deathstar, but probably that was because it had to cover less volume so there were no wibbly wobbly discrepancies.

Are you trying to say that droids aren't sentient?  You monster!

My thoughts run along similar lines, praguepride ...

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My pet theory is that Rey is Han/Leia's daughter and Ren's twin sister.  :>

• we already know twins run in the Skywalker line, and is a nice parallel with the separation of Luke/Leia as kids
• though it only fits, given what we saw in TFA if Han and Leia think that their daughter Rey was killed a while back - could be the cause of their estrangement and Ren's turning to the Dark side ?  Also explains why the family she was waiting for never came to find her
• explains Rey's affinity with the Force, through Leia, rather than Luke, back to Anakin

Either way (whether Luke is father or uncle) the familial link would explain much.

Mechanical genius/ace pilot/crack shot ... definitely: while Rey'd been scavanging for years, as you say young Anakin was portrayed similarly, building his own C-3PO and an ace pod-racer, and Luke 'used to bullseye womp rats' and used his X wing's cannon + Force to destroy the original death star, which implies the Force could guide your aim with a blaster as well as with a light sabre

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Wrapped in spoiler tags, cos I only saw the movie for the first time yesterday (DVD came out), so there may be others with similar mileage (in which case - what are you doing in this thread ??!!)  <grrrins>

Personally, I liked it, but to me it seemed the first two thirds of the movie was a nod to the original trilogy ... which worked for me (I was there at the original showing back in '77), but not for my wife who always preferred Trek.  JJ definitely kept the flavour and pacing of the originals, IMHO, but I think the many different threads that had to come together was probably the reason why it didn't hang together as well as his ensemble Star Trek reboot.

Came into its own in the last 40 mins, though, and set things up nicely to go forward under its own steam in Episode VIII, if they can pull it off.  Best acting definitely Rey, followed by Finn.

I think one of the reasons the story seems scattered and hard to follow is because they already knew this would be a trilogy.  Yes, the original trilogy was written as a trilogy...but Lucas had no guarantee whatsoever that he'd get anything more than 'STAR WARS' (hence, no 'Episode IV' in the crawl of the original release).  He had to write ANH as a stand-alone.  Same thing with JJ Abrams' 'Trek' reboot...sure, there were high hopes for it, but Star Trek had been waning from favor with the general public and there was a chance it could have been a very expensive flop.  So they didn't leave much in it open-ended, to be explained in some later film.

And, in many ways, it's oddly appropriate that a Star Wars movie would have that issue.  Prior to ESB, sequels weren't common, at all, and they were generally something along the lines of a Sherlock Holmes movie, where each one stood on its own...yes, the technically could build on each other, but they didn't follow one after another, to pick up dangling threads from the film before and leave threads for the film after.  A lot of people felt cheated, in a way, when ESB ended with Han gone, Lando and Chewie headed who-knows-where to find him, and Luke in surgical recovery...all with the lingering "Was Vader telling the truth?!!" hanging over the whole thing.

I'm hoping they do a better job of dealing with them in ep 8...but I expect we'll end up with a few questions answered and a LOT of new questions.  I do hope someone sat down and plotted out the over-arching story...I can't imagine they didn't, but I haven't heard much reference to any sort of master plotline.  There have been a few comments made, here and there, that indicate there is, in fact, a master-story (like Abrams' commenting recently that Rey's parents haven't been introduced to us yet, which shoots down many of the fan theories on her origins)...so, it's just a hope.

I'm among those who weren't overwhelmed with joy for it, but felt like it was a huge step back in the right direction.  It's got a LOT of problems...but it at least gets back to the swashbuckling fantasy adventure that made Star Wars beloved.  I found the prequels almost ponderously slow, by comparison, and soap-opera-ish in their dramatic layers.  I think Abrams took a lot of things to some ridiculous extremes...and I would have liked more story and less 'LOOK AT THE COOL STUFF!' effects sequences.

But at least we don't have Ep3 as the final say in cinematic Star Wars, anymore...and I hope they get better from here.

Yes, a dear friend of ours commented after seeing Fellowship of the Ring that the movie "seemed to leave things unresolved", though we quickly explained there were two more to go.  :>

JJ also said that Cumberbatch wasn't Khan ... but from a quick Google he wasn't happy about that afterwards, so maybe this time it's not just trying to save a few mysteries.

Would have been an elegant solution, but I'm sure that there's more than just the Skywalker line that are strong in the force ...

Oooh !  I've had another idea !  Perhaps Rey's a clone !  We know that tech is  well and truly around.  <grrrrins>

Wot ?

I could mention my other pet theory that Supreme Leader Snoke is actually Jar Jar Binks gone over to the Dark Side.  I'm sure membership comes with a dialect coach. :>

And I loved the way ESB ended with all the cliffhangers - really built the anticipation for RotJ.

But the cliffhangers in ESB didn't detract from the movie, I felt. Stuff actually happened to move the plot forward in both the movie in and of itself and the overall story.

Harry Potter's last movie being cut in half was justified because the last book was really two different stories, the FINAL reveal of how immortality actually worked (and how to counter it) and the big epic battle that had been building for nearly a decade. Now I think you could have totally chopped it down and made a single epic 3 hour movie and left the rest of it for the deleted scenes LotR style where you have a 'director's cut' that is 6 hours long BUT I think that final book split was justified.

Hunger Games splitting the last book (and Hobbit being split into a trilogy) really peached me off though because those were blatant money grabs. You could have pretty much cut the entire Mockingjay Part 1. as a movie and just go straight from Movie #2 to Movie #4 with maybe adding 5-10 minutes of "oh by the way..." type scenes. And the Hobbit...ugh, just ugh. LotR was a labor of love by Peter Jackson, the Hobbit was a Michael Bay-esque "show me the money" cash grab and it showed. I feel bad for the actors because I know Cumberbatch really acted the cranberries out of Smaug but who cares, crabapple 'made for the money' movie :(
This message was last edited by a moderator, as it was against the forum rules, at 16:19, Mon 18 Apr 2016.

And, apparently, Abrams has now recanted his statement that we hadn't met Rey's parents yet...so, maybe, the Papa-Luke theory has some room to be considered anew.

Agreed on The Hobbit.  I actually STILL haven't seen Desolation of Smaug...after An Unexpected Journey, I just couldn't bring myself to sit through more of Jackson's revisionist version of The Hobbit.  The ONLY reason I saw Battle of Five Armies is because a large group of friends went to a free showing of it, and invited me along.  And I've have felt really disappointed if I'd paid for a ticket for it.  I could go along with all the parallel storytelling, events included from sources other than the novel itself...but the 'inventing non-existent characters', monsters, battlefields, etc...too much.  I'll admit it, I'm a snob when it comes to Tolkien...I can tolerate abridging his works (like they did with the Rankin-Bass animated version of The Hobbit), because it's still his story, just minus a few details.  I could talk myself into accepting most of the changes Jackson made to LOTR, because he was updating the story for a modern audience with different sensibilities than were prevalent when Tolkien was writing.

But what he did to The Hobbit?  That was outright adulteration of the source-material.

But, back to the subject at hand...ESB was a good movie...cinematically, it's still the best one of the whole lot, easily.  But it was, at the time it came out, a shock to audiences...it was a big gamble, on Lucas' part, to leave the story hanging at that point and hope he'd won enough goodwill from the audience to keep them coming back to the next one, and it paid off.  But we've gotten to the point where, even when we see a movie that isn't written with a sequel already announced before the first one comes out, every little story thread that's left dangling instantly becomes fodder for a potential sequel, in the minds of the audience.  For most people at the time, ESB was the first time the word 'sequel' entered their vocabulary.  It just wasn't done, back then...and it DEFINITELY wasn't done in a way that split the story with so many points lacking closure.

Contrast that with TFA...where it was known from before the writers even began formatting the script that it was to be the first installment of a definite trilogy.  The impetus to keep the storytelling tight and crisp drops off dramatically at that point, and stuff that would have been wrapped up in the first film, otherwise, is now stretched out over two or even all three.  Things that would otherwise have been kept quiet until the second or third movie are now dangled teasingly in the first, but without anything to give us a clear notion of where it's going from there.  Unlike LOTR or The Hobbit (or Twilight or The Hunger Games or Divergent or any of these other 'franchise films' based on books), the audience doesn't already know where the story is going to go.  Like it or not, this current Star Wars trilogy is, in many ways, a foray into a new realm of cinematic storytelling...its closest analog is probably the MCU, but even then, the audience knows that, in the end, the heroes will win and the villains will lose, because that's what comic books generally do (we follow the story to see HOW the heroes win).  With Eps 7-9, we're not even altogether certain yet just who the villain is, really, much less how often the heroes will confront him and how many (more) heroes will fall in the process.  In that regard, I can forgive them for paralleling Ep4 so much in this story...they're taking the audience into new territory in their storytelling technique, so they want to minimize the risk by getting us back to a familiar place before they go off the edge of the map on us.

I think they could have done it better, yes.  Absolutely, I think they could have done it better.  But I'm kind of excited to see how they proceed.

I'm super duper excited for Rogue One, finally a star wars movie that isn't all about the jedi. I honestly think the Jedi are one of the worst things to focus on in the star wars universe. You have galactic civil wars, you have smugglers and pirates and aliens and unknown parts of the galaxy. The jedi are great in the background but after 7 movies and multiple television shows focused ENTIRELY on light side vs. dark side it'd be nice to see something else for a change...

AMEN.  The Star Wars group that I played in for...ages, really...had very few Force users involved, and only a couple of them even had aspirations to become Jedi.  We had a LOT of fun figuring out how to solve problems WITHOUT resorting to the Force (I've rarely seen a game where players so rarely spent Force points...)

Very definitely looking forward to Rogue One.  What little bits of it were shown in the trailer reminded me quite a bit of my old gaming group, in terms of who was involved (personality-wise) and the scale of the assignments we got.  It'll be fun to see how much of the actual plot-line ends up having a similar sort of familiarity to it.  (I remember when Mystery Men came out--one of my roommates had gone to see it and told me I HAD to see it.  I was a little reluctant at first...but it ended up feeling very much like our Marvel Super Heroes group..."Yep, we'd do that."  "Yep, we'd probably botch that in very similar fashion."  "Yeah, someone would end up doing something THAT ridiculous and saving the day..."  That movie still holds a fascination for me way beyond the scope of its story...)

In a spirit of fairness, I decided to watch TFA again ...

... OK, it hangs together better on a repeat viewing.  Only bit of remaining confusion for me was the scene with Max Von Sydow right at the very start (worst possible place for confusion, of course) - well acted as always, but from what he seems to know/imply, Max's character seemed to be someone very important that I should know (to earn that "an old ally" in the rolling text).  Only other complaints are that the base commander seems a tad young for the job (Grand Moff Tarkin wasn't a spring chicken), though I liked the actor and Snoke isn't as menacing as he should be (though that should get sorted when we actually meet him in person in the next movie).

But definitely much more coherent and enjoyable the second time through, for my money.  I'm thinking it's all to do with those expectations we discussed - I went into the first viewing wanting it to be incredible ... and praying it wasn't a disappointment, and I think watching in that light, even unconsciously, means I was looking for good bits and bad bits and not actually watching it as a whole movie in its own right.

Rey and Finn still the best characters/actors IMHO, though the CGI people did a great job with BB-8, getting a lot out of him (reminicent of Wall-E's stellar performance).  :>

A grizzled old veteran compared to the kids Starfleet has commanding ships, these days.

Maybe the Empire has been having human resources retention problems.  Crazed ideological groups do seem to have more appeal to the young.

You do know that he's an actual, physical droid that they designed and built, right?  That's actually a thing that was running around the set and with which everyone was interacting.  I think the one of the few times they resorted to CGI for BB-8 was his little cut scenes during the TIE Fighter chase aboard the Millenium Falcon.

Reference: http://www.howbb8works.com/
This message was last edited by the user at 19:42, Fri 29 Apr 2016.

In reply to Skald (msg # 99):

I tried watched the movie, like I do every other movie, without previews and watch it for the movie but TFW just could never fully get off the ground (it felt like to me).  Yeah it was moving but it was like scraping along the ground, just barely making clearance.  This was just the overall feeling.

W0LF0S ... I did not know that !  Wiki says they used the puppet version for a lot of the "walking" scenes and tidied it up in post-production, but even so, colour me impressed.  Only thing that would make it better is if they could have got an actor inside it ... c'mon, I'm sure Disney are looking at minaturisation technology ?  Didn't they use that in Ant-Man ? ;>

Sittingbull - "scraping along the ground" = nice metaphor for most of the scenes with the Millenium Falcon ! :>   TFA certainly owed a lot to the original movies, and I don't think would stand up on its own, unlike the Trek reboot (IMHO, and I always preferred Star Wars to Star Trek) - but I know what you mean ... I think of TFA more as worthy than great.  It just lacked a spark - I wasn't feeling that the characters were ever in danger, not like back in the original, so it wasn't involving the audience (ie me) as much as it needed to.