Patroklos wrote:
The good:
-The world felt real, and it looked right. None of the gratuitous and inappropriate CGI from the prequels. The only time I was pulled out the movie by crappy CGI was the glasses alien from the fake cantina scene. Even the stupid in concept Starkiller base looked like Star Wars at least.
Considering that we really get to see three worlds for a prolongated duration, Jakkooïne certainly feels the more real but there's barely anything there, it's actually damned cheap, set-wise. Yet, we have at least two star destroyers that have miraculously crashed in the same exact deserted area? The rest of the locations feel fake. Starkiller is simply an insane design. It makes zero sense and would consume far more energy only to allow this big, retarded chasm not to crumble onto itself. As for Tacoland, yes, a lake and a forest. Wow, paint me impressed. It would take a ton of genius juice to actually fuck that up and make it feel non-real. The cantina was a nice touch in the way that it reminded me of that feeling I had when going through the RPG WEG stuff. But then, again, it's a cantina reboot. Been there done that.
- The new star destroyer in general. It looked good, and there was a lot of details for tech junkies like me to obsess over.
Oddly enough, we don't see much of it. The whole hexagon docking bay edge felt forced: a poor way of saying we're new, oh oh oh. We barely see anything about it that satisfies the curiosity. For some reason, old school filming that isn't so concerned about zooms, whirls and shaky cams allowed us to better appreciate the beauty and details of star destroyers in the OT.
- I thought the internal First Order sets were especially good. I looked and felt like a really advanced and thus menacing military local, though how the First Order cam in possession of it or maintains it...
I'm not sure what there is to be all excited about. It's just a little brush over imperial interior design, which was very solid in style.
- The aliens looked good, unlike the cartoons from the prequels.
Leaving aside the cantina ones which would certainly not need to be CGI, aside from the orange dry fruit grandma who did look fake, I don't think you could make it more fake when it comes to CGI monsters. The entire Men In Black stupid sequence in Han's new and larger freighter had those tentacled monsters that never looked real nor convincing. Nor even lethal to begin with. In fact this entire sequence was utter crap and a complete waste of time that could have been used on better exposure of the political context or characters. And seriously, the odds of Solo being there to grab the MF in the right spot, particularly in the middle of some imperial raid on Jakku?
-The music and sound were great
Actually, not really. The many tracks were flat and boring and for those that tried to be OT-ish, they came out as nothing more than mixes of classical SW samples that weren't given a conclusion. Both the OT and the PT had fantastic pieces. TFA had nothing remarkable.
- Han's performance Fynn's performances. With one exception...
They're relatively terrible. Han's coolness is cranked up to absurd levels, and Finn is a black "dude" with 90s black bro mannerisms, especially when it's time for a Finn joke.
The bad:
- Its established early on that a storm trooper blaster can disable an X-wing. Except we see a TIE fighter take a dozen hits from stormtrooper blasters a bit later with zero effect on what is presumably a more fragile craft.
They'll say dialed down yields. And no shields up? Also, Poe's craft was hit in the unshielded aft IIRC. Now, why they keep that rear section unprotected despite the numerous times Reb... Resistance fighters get TIEs on their sixes...
- Rey is a simultaneously an awesome pilot who can fly an unfamiliar craft better than any other character we see in any SW movie for no apparent reason, is a gifted engineer for some reason, and is an accomplished swordsman who can beat trained Jedi. And not just a swordsman, but a lightsaber swordsman.
She's a complete Mary Sue. I've read the counter arguments, they're just silly. She's not somehow just as good (which would already be a lot) but actually comes ontop of people who should at least be somehow experienced enough in their area of application. And it is quite tiring that it keeps piling up. And all that with absolutely zero hint that she got any kind of training or exposure to any education whatsover. At least both Anakin and Luke had a lot of practice. Luke knew how to shoot, he also piloted an atmospheric craft and X-wings can do that and are piloted likewise in space, plus he could have easily been briefed up. Although you'll notice that it's made quite clear that he's not that very good during the assault on the Death Star. He almost kills himself. He repairs droids to some degree and it stops there. He doesn't do repairs on the Millennium Falcon. In fact he doesn't even know what is the bleeping signal that indicates deflector shields are falling. He can't understand droidese nor wookieese. In the end, he get trained by no less than two of the best Jedi masters and barely gets ontop of his discipline. In fact his piloting skills are not demonstrated any further across the entire OT and his lightsabre skills are only put to use around TESB. Where he gets owned. Anakin is skilled in driving dangerous vehicles, he uses the Force unwittingly and is a bit overpowered there but it's not glaring nor insulting. He repairs droids and that's about it too. If it weren't for the fact that he worked on C3PO, it would be rather bland. By the time he gets a full Jedi training, he gets really good in piloting but ain't perfect either (R2 helps him against the buzz droids and he almost destroys Obi-Wan's fighter with one of his "superb" ideas, and makes several mistakes in combat.
Rey, OTOH, understands everything, shoots and fights better than anyone. She's simply boring.
You say all Jedi are great pilots eh? Skywalker was good in ANH but its established he has experience as a pilot and is good at it early on, and at no point is he portrayed as particularly better than anyone he is flying with on the DS attack.
And on top of what I said above, he gets a copious amount of help too. As for the torpedo, it's quite obvious that they were preprogrammed to go for the core once in the pipe. Torpedoes would simply have no reason to brake down when entering something that would be literally blinding them on the IR scale.
She is a scavenger so she is awesome at technical stuff eh? When you are comfortable letting my laboriously trained and certified Airbus qualified mechanic work on the Boeing you are about to fly on let me know. A little bit of tech savvy is cool and expected, it went a bit far in my opinion. At least in ANH there was R2 to do things like stop the trash compactor.
Mechanical knowledge is indeed complicated. You just need to work on cars or motorbikes to know that you cannot randomly jump from one model to another, especially if there's a large generational gap. But here, Rey literally schools Solo. People have said she was a big fan of the Millennium Falcon. Ah? She just knows the name of one of the iconic ships that helped the Rebels in their victory. And apparently she only knows the ship by name because it's been parked right in front of her nose for possibly years and she never recognized the thing.
I'm also surprised there's not the slightest security measure on either TIE fighters or the MF. Anybody can jump in and take control of said ships!
-She was good with a stick earlier in the movie you say? True, but why was she so good with it? She grew up in a rough place? Well apparently so did everyone else on that planet. The force made her automatically good? Somebody should have told Luke that when a target droid was zapping him in the ass. Its not like Luke was some sort of natural in ESB. Kylo is no Vader true, but Rey is no Luke either who at this point had known he was a force sensitive for a year, was at least familiar with a light saber and had also just finished intensive force training with Yoda. Non of those young lings in the prequels seemed to be naturals. And it goes without saying a stick is not a sword, and a sword is not a lightsaber. Its as stupid as Mutt being a swordsman in KOTCS.
Kylo may not be Vader material but he literally TROUNCED Luke's students after receiving a training from Jedi Master Luke Skywalker, and Luke Skywalker could apparently do nothing to stop Kylo.
-Speaking of the KOTCS, Leia was horrible. A totally throw away character and performance not unlike when they dug Marian Ravenwood out of the grave. The quality of the acting was about the same. Her scenes with Han were wooden, her roll as the rebel military leader could have been anyone else and should have been. I am not saying should couldn't have been made interesting and integral to the plot, she simply wasn't in this case. A Mon Mothma type would have been a better fit.
The botox face didn't help. I really expected some warmth to come out of her or the exchanges she had with Han but it never happened. It was incredibly cold, wooden, flat and forced too because let's be honest, it was a big exploitation of old timers' nostalgia. Point being, she was useless and would have been far more useful if written off as already dead by the time of TFA. It would have better explained Solo's situation and even perhaps Ben Solo going nuts.
- Why is Leia a general? She was never hinted at being talented in that regard before. Her strength was always political as well as having the gravitas of Alderran behind her. She was in the briefing room for some of the military stuff but it was never her thing. Was that not Ackbar standing right there? My audience thought so and clapped when they saw him. There was no point to shoehorning her into that roll.
30-50 yo appeal. Nothing more. The moment TFA was announced, you knew there would be that and it would need to be handled with care and intelligence for it to work.
- Its ANH but BIGGER!!! I honestly thought they were making an inside joke when they showed the infographic about Starkiller (stupid name) being 20 times bigger than the Death Star. Like they were making fun of themselves.
The entire briefing sequence felt like a spoof. Never at once I ever got the feeling that this was a credible situation. It was like a badly acted fanmade movie. It's a big stressful situation but all these cool people know exactly what to say at the exact time, they always know when to speak. It feels horribly orchestrated so that all the essential information is delivered as fast as possible, just like an ad. At least the scene in ROTJ was more believable, if only because only real generals talked and knew what to say, and that it was due to proper preparation. Also, the ANH briefing is the most academic but probably remains the best one. You know that despite the urgency, it's a concise description that results from a lot of talks and analysis of the plans given to the Rebellion by R2. Due to the context of the attack and the absolute unknown, the "briefing" in TFA should have been a complete deafening zoo, a stressful moment but no, everything's cool and neatly ordered, perfectly delivered. And of course the device has a weakness which does not require any kind of sacrifice or effort to get. It's almost like if someone in the room had just scooped the tip from the interwebs. It feels terribly fake. But then I remembered this is JJ Abrams here and he always has to have the BIGGER and BETTER version of everything.
The feeling I had after watching that movie was that Abrams reminds me of CEOs who fire entire staff members to bring their own, to mark territory with urine pee'd all over the walls. JJA is just your average EUphile and shows no respect to the source material. Are you happy to see Kirk's Enterprise again, WHAMMO look at that gigantic Narada! Well, we are in the next film so what should we do? BOOM, lets have a super dreadnaught USS Vengence come out of nowhere! You thought the Death Star was big? Posh, a mere moon. Starkiller is a whole PLANET. Speaking of planets, destroying one is so last season. Mine destroys multiple planets at once! And drinks energy from stars via a mechanism we are never told about. Overall it was a big roll eyes.
Making everything bigger and abusing this trope is simply the sign of bad writing.
Hell, screw bowing up planets, sucking stars dry is FAR more impressive. I would love to see the math involved in storing the mass of a star inside a planetary sized body. With the energy of a star to boot! The mechanics of not having the star go supernova or generate some other calamity when screwing with it so much is Forerunner scale shit. I wonder if Abrahm's realizes how awesome his First Order actually is? Does he know that he succeeded so spectacularly in his one upmanship wank? Its funny to see him pull that off when being so minimalist with everything else.
It's totally made of stupid, that's all. The FO isn't even described once as having the potential to build a tenth of a Death Star. As for the concept itself, if all you want to do is blast six to seven planets and moons at once, maybe all that is needed is something like a Death Star six or seven times bigger than the first one? Do you even need to blast planets to pebbles to win? And that whole mumbo jumbo talk about the beam being hyperspacish... the hell. It was clearly sublight. They cannot even manage to be coherent for something so utterly huge, like if there had been two different producers. Surely, if the beam had been that fast, we'd have seen nothing and the next frame WHAM! a huge red line shot for several seconds.
Speaking of stellar engineering, what would happen if I modified a planet like we see at Starkiller base? It seems to me that would have some serious side effects that would need some pretty drastic solutions to keep the atmosphere, gravity and planetary stability we observe.
It is stupid. Building a single large gun that can immediately channel a fraction of a star to redirect it towards a planet would have been less complicated, more effective.
- Who was the First Order and what do they want? I was never told, so I didn't care. Who was the Republic that gets mentioned once before it gets destroyed? I was never told so I don't care. Who is the Rebellion exactly and why are they still around? I was never told so I don't care. Who is Snooki and what does he want? I am never told so I don't care. This is really important because while I might just be a nitpicking nerd, my wife who has never seen a Star Wars movie in her life and who humored me by going with me (we just moved so I have no nerd friends yet) asked these questions the second the credits rolled. And this is for a movie that has an opening scroll to explain these exact things.
Nothing is explained. Absolutely nothing. Heck, even the debut scroll focuses on Luke when it seems to be a plot point that takes a back seat for most of the movie! it's utterly stupid. Compare that to the hints we get in ANH with old generals (that's already far better) talking about the battle station, its purpose, after Tarkin quickly revealing that there's an Emperor, a Senate and that local governors would get more control over their territories. If TPM was a mess because too complicated, TFA can't even be a mess because there's nothing at all to toy with. You don't even know why the First Order wants to blast the Republic, what they're doing or even where they are, you see planets destroyed but it doesn't compute, there's no link. And the only bit of relevant information is delivered in such a badly written and acted speech that if you get pulled out of SoD, you lose the entire core data that might have explained at least what was going to happen. And seriously, that many moons closely orbiting a planet? Are we playing snooker now?
- Captain Phasm was completely wasted. She was a major advertising and merchandising point going in and I was assuming she would have some sort of pivotal role in the plot. Her absence was noticed and her part with the shields was jarring. The audience in my theater reacted with a noticeable "what the hell" when she not only was captured effortlessly but then treasonously deactivates the defenses for an entire planet on the eve a victory she was presumably personally invested in? BS and it was the greatest abuse of convenience writing in the movie. The movie stopped being fun for me at this point.
It's simply terrible. I barely caught the entire hype built around her character but I knew she'd logically have to be something major in the movie. What a let down, and what a treason too! But what to expect from a base that is so poorly defended? ANH and ROTJ made sense. The Death Star was a battle station and even if you could bring a nuke inside, it would only leave a minuscule dent. The chances of a Master Jedi getting inside, with help, and using tricks to ... only allow a freighter to escape were fairly low. Not to say that Tarkin had actually let the whole thing happen! And so did Palpatine, who needed the Rebels to believe they could take the shield down so the entire Rebel fleet would come to face the Empire.
-Fynn, I really want to like you and do in a certain way but you were written all wrong. For one he is indoctrinated from birth. More on that latter. For someone indoctrinated to be a conformist super soldier from birth he sure seems really well socialized. But was he a super soldier? General forgettable pretty much says that but then we hear he was a sanitation worker? He is not a young guy and the First Order has had him from birth so he must have been doing sanitation for many years. So why is he a stormtrooper again? Does the super important main villian normally take the sanitation worker wipeouts with him? For their first mission no less.
My problems with Fynn go a bit further than that though. The way we are introduced to him is when he is visibly shaken by the death of a comrade. At first I thought this was great, stormtroopers are people and have feelings too! (this would be dashed of course). Even blood! These are soldiers fighting for and with people they believe in and even if I disagree with them and consider them evil I can still relate to that. And then he won't shoot the civilians, which is at odds with what we learn soon after about his upbringing but they mention a remediation program so obviously its not an outrageously uncommon thing to happen. Unfortunately this is all ruined when he starts casually murdering his former comrades in arms a few scenes later. Remember this all starts when he is visibly shaken by a comrades death. And its not like he is on some ideological crusade at this point, he is just trying to escape. Sorry dude, I don't believe it. It was jarring. Luckily the actor is so charismatic I can't turn my back on Fynn entirely.
Lando was charismatic. Finn is just noisy and forced onto the screen because of the plot. He's a totally incoherent character. Poor writing, again.
-Baby slavers. AGAIN the writers screw this up. I am not sure why they can not understand that normal people who can be convinced to believe and act on a heinous ideology are FAR more sinister and evil that clones or some bullshit brainwashed Kurt Russel "Soldier" ripoffs. Its also reduces the stakes when the bad guys don't have families of loved ones just like yours back home. The world loses depth.
If at least if had been forced integration into the army at the age of 18, it would make sense. That's how at least, in the EU, Thrawn built his army. This, without difficulties and mistakes that he had to correct from time to time. TFA's spin on that? It's just goofy, like a large number of things in that movie.
- Others have brought up minimalism and its a problem. I wouldn't mind it so much if they had a line about the First order being a super small extremist group but we see it can produce something hundreds of times the size of the Empire's most impressive achievement at the height of their galactic scale power. Yeah I said hundreds, because if that hologram was to scale which it obviously was meant to be it might be twenty times the size if we are comparing areas of a 2d silhouette but volume doesn't work that way.
There are even less fighters in TFA than there were in ANH. ANH: https://youtu.be/2WBG2rJZGW8?t=1m36s (around 30), TFA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UG2EdU1LgM (12, nothing more, and apparently they're sooooo fantastic that they managed to survive for a long, long time. A miracle, since they recklessly tend to love grazing the very area they're shooting missiles at. Ok, we got a bit of that in ANH and TPM but in TFA it's pushed to its extreme. Damn, the pilots are so dumb that they don't even protect Poe from getting hit by a TIE. They just... fly off. So Poe can be the only hero to get inside the base. I mean, this entire setting is retarded. And perhaps shooting at the breach might have helped increasing the chances of getting through? Who knows... I guess the Force is so naturally über strong in Poe, even if he's not Force attuned.
The Rebels have a few dozen star fighters as their "fleet." I might buy this if I was told the Rebellion was some breakaway group from the Republic who they are somehow at odds with but I am not told that. Why is there still a Rebellion anyway? We are not told, so I don't care.
- Stormtroopers are even more shit. I don't think we see a single one shot while in cover. They are always standing in the middle of hallways or out in the open. We see them mowed down with thoughtless ease. It reminds me of the worthless throwaway droid armies of the prequels. And they ended up adding just as much tension.
They didn't miss the civilians they had rounded up during the assault on Jakku.
- Han, Chewie, Rey and Flynn just waltz around Starkiller base like they own the joint. Nobody hears them killing people, nobody runs into them in the hallways. Those large open hallways, often times opening to chasms fill of windows and zero things to hide behind. Nobody notices the twenty odd dudes that are dead on the floor are missing. Apparently there was no security checkpoint to enter the base in the first place, and this happens multiple times as they go from facility to facility.
If only there had been scout troopers on speeder bikes or at least some form of mechanized support outside. AT-ATs, AT-STs, who knows? Based on past experiences, you'd certainly want to cover all your angles. ... wait, stupid me, it's a ANH reboot. A NEW, NEW HYPE.
- Hey, when we see StarKiller's mcguffin weakness whatever explode why are Kylo/Flynn/Rey and yeah Chewie too not instantly killed. We watch the thing explode and everything for miles around it go to complete shit. I run a pretty well but even at my best in OCS I could just barely break a 9 minute mile and a half run on a track. They literally just stumbled out of the facility into mountainous snowscape covered in forest (though there were no trees in the distance shots of the place). And how did Kylo get in front of you?
- So did all of this shit happen in a single solar system? We are told the weapon is hyper scale in speed but we actually watch it on screen not be. Whats cannon, dialogue or observed reality? I am sure this board will argue it to death. The people at fake cantina planet watch the beams hit, did they just happen to be on a planet at the center of Republic power? That's horribly minimalist, convenient and stupid. Not unprecedented, where have I seen the same plot convenience used before...
JJA loves to have planets being blown up and seen from other planets. Astrophysics be damned.
-Why did the rebels not just abandon their base? This is not like Yavin. The Rebels presumably have the Republic somehow on there side so there are plenty of places to go. The weapon is already operational so there is no need to attack it this second. Maybe wait a few hours and attack in force, a Republic fleet at your back maybe?
Couldn't. For some (stupid) reason, the entire fleet was orbiting Nameless planet-1. It's like if when the United States would be attacked, you'd put all your tanks and planes, boats even (screw physics again) all around Washington DC. And it would be nuked by a MIRV launched by a ten kilometers long super submarine located in the Black Sea or something.
-Its called Star Wars, so why are there no wars amongst the stars? We get the faiiiiiiiintest hint of some orbital fighter action but that's it. Speaking of which where the hell did that Star Destroyer go? Anytime it could be useful, like say intercepting space fighters, its nowhere to be seen.
Got renamed to STAR SUCK.
-Lets try something. I am going to give you a United States shaped piece of a map I cut out of a larger map. Additionally, all the geography of the United States will be on that piece but lets say no place names. How long do you think it would take you to figure things out? Or a five year old? I could understand it if the bullseye was on the piece you didn't have, even figuring out where the missing piece should go and just getting that info from another map means it is a large are to search through. But they had the piece with the bullseye on it...
I guess they suck at data comparison. You cannot beat Dooku who at least erases data beforehand. And adding insult to all that, the missing piece really cleverly fits in the entire map like if Luke had used the equivalent of Photoshop 3D or something. The Hurr Durr audience needn't complicated stuff.
- As others have said its ANH in all the broad strokes and a surprising number of small ones. With some VERY slight modifications you could just call it a reboot of ANH.
-Would someone FOR THE LOVE OF GOD show actors how to hold and shoot weapons. The number of times I see characters limp wristedly and one handedly toss a blaster bolt here and there with zero recoil effects was frustrating. The most glaring example is when Rey, who we establish has no idea how to use her weapon, starts plinking stormtroopers (standing in the open for no reason of course) from fifty yards with a hand gun like it ain't no thang. She just daintily flips her wrist this way and that way, making shots a Navy SEAL couldn't make. Uncommon accuracy is not a sin for action movies, but you are actors, ACT like you are shooting a real weapon. Han gets a shout out about this too. At one point when he is coming out of the collapsed fake cantina he kills two troopers in front of him quick like and then ever so lightly just swings his wrist over to shoot a trooper behind him without looking. I don't even think the barrel ever even lines up with the target. I am sure that was supposed to be badass, it just looked really fake.
It's an extremely tiring trope that immediately breaks SoD. In the middle of a battlefield where people are actually trying to shoot you, are you seriously going to take one blind shot at an armoured trooper who carries a rifle? Not even shoot twice, just in case? Not even, wait, look at the guy just to be sure? Where did Solo acquire this insane superhero aim? Surely, not when he became part of the Rebellion... https://youtu.be/9k-941c-ZTc?t=1m46s
- For us tech junkies there is some real issues with firepower from this movie. For one we see a slight TIE fighter strafing can take out the main turrets of a Star Destroyer. To me that means these new ones are glass cannons sans their shields.
That actually looks pretty logical. There are even less reasons for them to be armoured or shielded like fighters. Then we see X-wings make perfect one round shots on storm troopers on the ground (something no TIE fighter does though we see they strafe many times). Not only that but when the X-wings do that the shots that hit a stormtrooper cause no more visible damage than a normal blaster rifle. Just something to think about it.
- Obligatory X-wing flying inside something to destroy it sequence. I was unimpressed though because apparently you don't need legendary badasses like a Lando or a Han or even established ace pilot like whats his name. Any old podunk scavenger girl can pull that off ace, you ain't impressing anyone with that shit.
Rey nailing so perfectly the maneuverability of that ship is just mind boggling. Oh wait, it's been said she's a pilot? Ain't she clever?
-Penetrating shields by hyperspace jumping. Verrrrry convienient. It probably could have helped on a lot of other occasions. Maybe like, when there was this moon sized battle station where you know, the shield around it was a really big and insurmountable deal. Maybe you had to go on this near suicide mission to disable said shield (who was in charge of that mission again?), and then when you almost fucked it up your buddies were stuck on the wrong side of it and really would have loved a way to get on the right side of it. Good thing there was no enemy fleet that you could have avoided by hyperspacing past it right onto your target avoided lots of headaches. Come to think of it wouldn't a certain group of X-wings attacking a planet have hyperspace capabilities too?
AKA how to ruin the universe. Now I'm waiting for the computer guided super nuke that can bypass any planet's shield. And yes, since there are no carrier ships available to the Resistance, clearly those X-wings should come with hyperdrives too. Besides, the CGI of the entire Millennium Falcon crash sequence looked horribly fake.
-Fake Cantina. You knew you couldn't do it better so why go there? It wasn't even Jabba's Palace quality. In fact that whole scene was stupid. It was completely unnecessary from a plot perspective. And why the hell did Leia show up there? Good think that Star Destroyer wasn't there I guess. Though since it never does anything I bet the Rebels are used to pretending it doesn't exist.
-So this Republic. Its the new galactic government presumably and thus a big deal? Enough for the First Order to build a doomsday weapon to destroy as its first target. Yet once its destroyed it is never once mentioned again. Leia doesn't bring it up when we see her, including some of the situational expository scenes at the Rebel base. Supposedly it was protecting her and her forces somehow. I assume the galactic government failing might be a big deal. No mention of the billions that died. Nope. Never. Mentioned. Again.
Overall it had great bones, they just can't resist the urge to fuck things up with their writing. Its the same dumbass mistakes in movie after movie. Even then I would have been happy up to the attack on Starkiller base. After that every single scene was another convenience, mcguffin, out of character action or just plain didn't make sense.
Still better than the prequels. I have to ask though, what the hell are they going to do in the next movie. They burned through a lot of material on this one.