Yeah, they should have either saved it for a later movie and built up to it, or just not done it at all. Starkiller Base was supposed to be a big deal but it was introduced and then quickly dispatched like it was nothing even though it's one of the biggest and deadliest weapons ever. Nobody seemed impressed by it, and they barely even noticed or cared that a whole system and fleet was wiped out. They just put it in because it was on the checklist of "what fits in the original Star Wars trilogy."
I thought the concept was fine but time restrictions kept it from being properly fleshed out.
I can agree with these posts. As I think I said before, I really didn't mind a lot of the straight-up rip offs from the older movies in TFA. I didn't even mind the Death Star III that much right up until the end.
The scenes where they show Leia setting up the attack from Yavin IV-2, that's when I started to get really uncomfortable. From that point on I kept thinking, "No, they aren't going to do
another trench run on it....NO, they wouldn't do that again...Would they???? NO...no.....no....OMG they are doing it again?!"
That really ticked me off and soured me on the movie a bit. But overall I loved it and I didn't mind the other plot rip-offs. I have no idea why Death Star III/Trench Run III/YavinIV-2 pissed me off so bad but it did.
I also thoroughly agree that Death Star III (in addition to being a blatant rip off) was not explored thoroughly enough. It wound up almost being a throw-away element of the plot. I mean really, the Rey imprisonment/escape and Han Solo deaths could have happened in any other setting and you could have removed the entire Death Star III and it wouldn't drastically change the story.
Something like a Death Star needs to be a major plot element - it needs to be almost a character in its own right. But this one was meh and solely existed to allow a re-enactment of old battles.
I can agree with this. Personally, I would have liked the trilogy to be expanded to a 4-part series, or maybe even a 5-part. I'll rail against unnecessary lengthening wherever deserving (Hobbit), but I do think they're trying to pack a little too much into these new Star Wars films based on what I saw from The Force Awakens. It's strange to watch a movie that was 2 hours and <30 minutes long and have at least 3-5 separate topics that couldn't be explained or elaborated on because there wasn't enough time. Not even that there were unnecessary parts thrown in, just... too many parts.
As it stands right now, the only way to get a solid understanding of the events in the movie are to read the books, and Disney has done a surprisingly bad job of making those accessible in an easy-to-read fashion. The ordering is all messed up and they have very little distinction between novels and graphic novels, and I think it's bad if you need to spend 30-60 minutes first figuring out the right order of books before you can even buy them and get into them properly.
And, on top of that, I am a firm believer that books and movies should complement one another but never be necessary to gain necessary understanding. I love the EU novels, but I'd be pissed if I had to watch the movies for them to make sense, or vice versa. They're fantastic separately and they grow more valuable/sentimental if you know both intimately, but to have one require the other is... not good for the long-term health of a franchise and fanbase.
This is why I supported the decision to throw out the EU as canon from the get-go. With such a large body of work in the form of the EU, it's really hard to pick and choose what stays as canon and it also boxes in the writers of the new trilogy if you keep any of it because the EU really tells the story of what happened after Endor (among many other things). Plus, while a lot of the EU was good, a lot of it was garbage. Better to throw out the lot and start over.
However, they inexplicably then decided that they would just retell major parts of the original trilogy, which is contradictory to the spirit of throwing out the entire EU. I don't really understand their thinking behind re-doing so much of the old tropes.
Side Note: When Abrams rebooted Star Trek, he had an easy-out to throw out all the old movies. It's a fairly established convention in Star Trek to have multiple parallel universes - they were even in the original 60's TV show. So when he threw out all the old canon in the guise of a dimensional-crossing black hole, it made a whole lot of sense.
He didn't have that easy-out with Star Wars so he just chucked the EU entirely. But then he decided to rip off the older movies for god knows why.
... Anyhoo, this comment:
. So what I mean is, if you hate Starkiller base fine, but you can't have it both ways. You cant say "I hate it because it's the Death Star" AND "I hate it because its not the Death Star."
and I would love it regardless... but the Lando Calrissian character isn't remotely close to the Finn character in terms of what it means to me. Finn represents something so rare for me as a Sci-Fi fan, that makes my inner 5 year old weep tears of joy. Again I have thoroughly enjoyed and would have enjoyed another Luke-ish protagonist without batting an eyelash, but Finn was like that last Christmas present that your parents hid from you until the end, the one they knew you weren't expecting, but were going to go bonkers for. Comparing Finn to Lando just illustrates how some folks can easily miss the numerous ways that TFA is very different from the OT. It is certainly similar in many ways, but it is not, absolutely NOT the same movie.
