Star Wars

[BvBPL]

We start with a space battle. A droid containing information vital to the good guys escapes to wander a dessert planet. On this planet, the droid meets a plucky youth whose natural abilities are stymied by circumstance. There's a wretched hive of scum and villainy. Escapes are made on a seeming rust bucket of a ship that's actually a souped-up classic space GTO. The princess is captured by the bad guys and needs rescuing. A noble mentor dies. We end with laser sword fights and a space ship flying through the narrow trenches of a space station to blow up the weapon of ultimate evil.

That's Star Wars. Come to think of it, it is also Return of the Jedi. To a point, it is Phantom Menace, although at least that had space Jamaicans, an interstellar trade conflict, and the GTO was actually a late-model Camaro.

And it's Force Awakens.

Few pieces of entertainment have substantiated Robert Pirsig's thesis that there are no new ideas under the sun(s) that someone hadn't thought of earlier like Force Awakens. The whole thing is a rehash of the original work. It is as though Abrams basically took Lucas's chocolate-chip cookie recipe and just made another batch. Which isn't to say it is bad. I like chocolate-chip cookies after all. But I also like variety.

Why is it that most interesting thing about this film is finding out that Max von Sydow is still alive?

Spoiler alert: the next Star Wars film will end with the good guys hurt and at their nadirs as evil seems to triumph.

If you need discussion points, feel free to discuss how different artists can interpret the same paint-by-numbers plot in different ways. Or whether a lock-step retelling of an original, giving the fans exactly what they want, is actually a good idea or not. Or discuss the differences between the films, of which there are many. Of whether design by committee of one of the biggest entertainment franchises of all time to develop a film that is precision-targeted to tug at the hearts of long-time fans without alarming them amounts to the Second Coming or just so much candy floss.

 

[Glassfan]

Now you've done it. Let the flaming begin....

 

[duckstab]

The plotting of the whole series has always been sloppy and amateurish. But the execution has generally been so well crafted that I didn't care that much. Even the prequel trilogy had its good points.

So I didn't have very high expectations for TFA to begin with. But as soon as I found out J.J. Abrams was directing it those epectations became effectively nonexistent. I went to see TFA for basically the same reason I saw the second installment of his Star Trek reboot - my son wanted to go see it. Otherwise I wouldn't have bothered. There's just something cartoonish and clumsy about every Abrams movie I've seen and this one was no exception.

I did find Rey to be a bright spot, but otherwise, meh. Seeing Carrie Fisher and Harrison Ford dial in their performances was kind of sad. Their characters are supposed to be battleworn and tired, but I just got the sense that the actors were.

 

[Zkribbler]

Their characters are supposed to be battleworn and tired, but I just got the sense that the actors were.

It's called acting!

 

[duckstab]

It's called acting!

No, it's called acting when we respond to the characters, not the actors!

Which is not to blame Fisher and Ford, because we've seen both of them turn out fine performances before, and we know their capabilities.

I suspect we know J.J. Abrams' directorial capabilities as well.

 

[Arwon]

I was shocked that a movie built on a hero's journey monomyth contained plot beats as a prior movie in the same series. Plot beats to which the director was deliberately referring at both a textual and metatextual level. Fair outraged I was.

The weird thing is people seem to think they're clever for noticing the exact thing Abrams was doing deliberately for sound thematic reasons.

 

[BvBPL]

There's nothing inherent in the monomyth that prescribes a dessert planet, let alone escaping from it in a modified YT-1300. The notion is broad enough to include The Crying of Lot 49 after all.

For what it is worth, I think Abrams is noticeably less enamored by the concept than Lucas was.

As for Ford's performance, I thought he really held the movie together. The whole movie was cartoony, but Star Wars is cartoony.

 

[Angst]

The Star Killer thing was a bad idea. As everyone else suggested, they probably went ultra conservative because of the way the prequels didn't. Also the political situation should have been properly explained, just with one minute of exposition. Cutting that out and ignoring the lack of calm spots to breathe in the pacing, I found the movie fine for what it is, a fine popcorn movie - which the original trilogy always was, just with awesome art direction and sound design. People shouldn't elevate Star Wars beyond that, and for the people that are disappointed to see a well-crafted action movie, I'd ask what world they were living in. Contrary to Episode I, all of the characters' emotions felt strong and real. Finn's whole character arc was filled with a lot of heavy breathing (literally), but also a lot of genuine emotion. I won't rewatch it in the near future but am glad to having seen it in the cinema.

 

[BvBPL]

Easter Egg: the number of Princess Leia's cell in the Death Star is 2187.

Similar little gems exist throughout the movie.

 

[Joecoolyo]

Isn't a return to the original form what fans have wanted out of a new Star Wars movie? Or do people just love to complain?

 

[BvBPL]

People wanted to the tune of a billion dollars in ten days without a Chinese release, plus whatever merchandising came in.

Just because people want something doesn't mean that's what's good.

 

[Arwon]

I'll put my hand up as going in very skeptical because Abrams, but I really enjoyed it. The deliberate rhyming with ANH I found quite charming. Now we're set up for a more expansive, hopefully darker, movie with a different and probably better director.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Easter Egg: the number of Princess Leia's cell in the Death Star is 2187.

Similar little gems exist throughout the movie.

What is the significance of that number?

 

[Farm Boy]

I did find Rey to be a bright spot, but otherwise, meh. Seeing Carrie Fisher and Harrison Ford dial in their performances was kind of sad. Their characters are supposed to be battleworn and tired, but I just got the sense that the actors were.

Hehe! I was absolutely the opposite in my take on the characters.

 

[gay_Aleks]

It's called acting!

It's more like aging. Maybe, after the last prequel, Disney should have stuck Harrison Ford in actual carbonite until the time is nigh.

 

[Evie]

Calling two fouls on you.

"Begin with a space battle" and "The Princess gets captured and needs rescuing" are both false about The Force Awakens"

Spoiler :

(It begins with a ground battle, and the captured girl, who is not a princess, is more than capable of rescuing herself, thank you very much )

I'm hoping the decision to go back to so much familiar stuff was simply an attempt to touch base and bring back the familiar good stuff of STar Wars, after the...less-than-welcome prequels. They likely went over the top with it, but I think it was a good idea. Now, hopefully, they'll feel free to take the next film or two in new directions.

That doesn't mean I think episode 2 won't end badly for the good guys. Of course it will ; it'S the freaking middle part of a trilogy, ending badly for the good guy is the core of its job description (not that Peter Jackson noticed), since it has to set up the concluding chapter. But with some luck it might explore different directions from what Empire took to get there.

There's also the fact that when you stop and think about it, VII ended out with the good guys losing a LOT more (on a strategic level) than IV.

Spoiler :

Alderaan was essentially September 11 to Hosnian Prime's Pearl Harbor (if the President and the entire Congress had been on a visit to Pearl Harbor when it was attacked), in that one was a symbolic blow of little direct military consequence, versus the other cripling (for a time, at least) the most powerful potential adversary of the First Order

 

[caketastydelish]

I thought it was fantastic. Screw the haters.

 

[aelf]

I was one of those who thought that The Force Awakens would be something refreshing and was somewhat disappointed by it. I also thought that the bad guy would be cheesy but terrifying, but instead we got another young Anakin Skywalker.

For what it's worth, it's a decent episode anyway, and the characters are likeable. I actually liked the political machinations in the prequel episodes (though they may be a bit of a stretch, realistically speaking), as well as those in the Expanded Universe sequels, which offered a lot more of a strategic perspective on the post-Imperial situation. But The Force Awakens would do this time.

 

[BvBPL]

People shouldn't elevate Star Wars beyond that, and for the people that are disappointed to see a well-crafted action movie, I'd ask what world they were living in.

You can create a good action movie without reusing the same plot and sequence as done in three previous movies. This is filmmaking by Legos. It isn't even creative Lego play, but slavish following of the instructions to make something preapproved as acceptable for audiences ages thirteen and up.

The end result is cool, but, damn, they could have mixed things up.

 

[Angst]

You can create a good action movie without reusing the same plot and sequence as done in three previous movies. This is filmmaking by Legos. It isn't even creative Lego play, but slavish following of the instructions to make something preapproved as acceptable for audiences ages thirteen and up.

The end result is cool, but, damn, they could have mixed things up.

Why are you typing this? I literally adressed this in the post you quote.

And what do you mean by stating a need to appropriate Star Wars for "ages thirteen and up"? The original trilogy was a family action series. Wrinkling your nose because it doesn't live up to some arbitrary defined adultness is missing the point of the original trilogy. It was always for the inner child, or the literal child (Like Flash Gordon was, too). I don't know what you mean specifically about it, of course, but it seems like a snide remark against the kids, and well, I started watching Star Wars as a 6-year-old or something. I watched it constantly because Star Wars really speaks to children.

I'll try to reiterate and extrapolate, you know, lay it out for you. It's OK that people criticize it for being a rethread of Star Wars IV/VI, because a large part of the movie lost out on a lot of tension because of this fact, even if the effects were pretty. The problem is when people exit the theater and go "Wow, the movie wasn't challenging me in a significant way!" or "Wow, the movie wasn't artsy at all!" or "Wow, the movie wasn't intellectual at all!", I mean, what did you expect? It's a continuation of one of the greatest pop culture phenomena of the last century, drawing inspiration by several earlier pop culture phenomena of the last century.

"But isn't there depth in the old movies!?" Yes, there is, in the character arcs, and there is in this movie's character arcs too. But still - that's not why people watched the old movies to begin with. They watched them because of the tasty coating, the excellent special effects, the amazing art direction, the sound design, and the score.

Did you miss these things here? No. TFA pretty much does the same thing. TFA's characters are about as three dimensional as they get in those kinds of productions, and the effects do a nice mix of practical effects with real props, and CGI.

Although, isn't there areas where the movie can be criticized in this way of thinking, if we ignore the lackluster climax for a while? To be fair, the all-CGI characters didn't mesh well with the rest of the scenery. Also, the score didn't bring anything new either - that was one of the things the prequels did right.

Still, those people going out of the theater, expecting something else than a popcorn movie? Star Wars is amazing specifically for being a popcorn movie that does things well with a nice stylistic coating. That's how Star Wars works.