Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens

[Raithe]

I think Kylo Ren does make an interesting character. Taking a step back to look at it all,  He is a conflicted character. He feels the good inhimself, but wants to be Vader. It's why he loses to Rey. He's not fully commited, trying to convince himself he's as badass as Vader, but isn't. He can't handle adversity. When an enemy he expects to be a push over holds their ground, he's afraid.  Rey has that moment where she connects to the force, and it's from that that she pushes back and he loses his confidence. Before that point, he was using the pain of his wound to feed into his anger and force use. When his confidence shakes, he loses that and gets his ass kicked.

 

When he has the helmet on, he's pushing the whole Vader vibe. But when Vader would have killed a nearby Imperial for failure, he just throws a tantrum and damages the room he happens to be in. Very much the adolescent style.   Whenever you have those scenes where his helmet is off, it's deliberately showing him as that more humanised, young, not as confident as he tries to appear.

 

Edit: And for the other Star Wars related news..

 

Something David Prowse mentioned:

 

Disney changes it's policy on costumes in the parks.

Guests ages 14 years and older will no longer be permitted to wear costumes into the theme parks.

Disney said it is also discontinuing the sale of toy guns, including toy blasters and squirt guns on Disneyland Resort/Walt Disney World property and are no longer permitting these items to be brought into theme parks.

...

The reason, according to Disney, is to ensure a toy gun doesn’t cause distraction or confusion for employees and security personnel in the parks.

Edited December 20, 2015 by Raithe

[Drowsy Emperor]

 

I think Kylo Ren does make an interesting character. Taking a step back to look at it all,  He is a conflicted character. He feels the good inhimself, but wants to be Vader. It's why he loses to Rey. He's not fully commited, trying to convince himself he's as badass as Vader, but isn't. He can't handle adversity. When an enemy he expects to be a push over holds their ground, he's afraid.  Rey has that moment where she connects to the force, and it's from that that she pushes back and he loses his confidence. Before that point, he was using the pain of his wound to feed into his anger and force use. When his confidence shakes, he loses that and gets his ass kicked.

 

When he has the helmet on, he's pushing the whole Vader vibe. But when Vader would have killed a nearby Imperial for failure, he just throws a tantrum and damages the room he happens to be in. Very much the adolescent style.   Whenever you have those scenes where his helmet is off, it's deliberately showing him as that more humanised, young, not as confident as he tries to appear.

 

Edit: And for the other Star Wars related news..

 

Something David Prowse mentioned:

 

Disney changes it's policy on costumes in the parks.

Guests ages 14 years and older will no longer be permitted to wear costumes into the theme parks.

Disney said it is also discontinuing the sale of toy guns, including toy blasters and squirt guns on Disneyland Resort/Walt Disney World property and are no longer permitting these items to be brought into theme parks.

...

The reason, according to Disney, is to ensure a toy gun doesn’t cause distraction or confusion for employees and security personnel in the parks.

 

 

I think it was a good idea to have a villain who isn't completely evil, but he shouldn't have had a helmet from the start. It makes him look like a tryhard. And he shouldn't be so embarrassingly verbose about his inner struggle, it should have just been acted out, implied - and not as an abstract conflict of light and dark, but rather his love for his family vs his (totally unexplained and unfounded) desire to be like vader (what is vader to him?).

 

It would have spared us sentences like "I feel the pull of the light". 

Edited December 20, 2015 by Drowsy Emperor

[Nonek]

I wonder why the big bad is so poorly done. How did they come up with the idea of calling the ultimate bad guy Snoke, make him look like Gollum with the oversize hologram and all.

 

I mean you can take your pick of the evil Kotor characters and every single one is more fearsome, including granny Kreia. 

 

From what little I saw of him when not snoozing I was similarly unimpressed, but the thought of Kreia being the antagonist instead...you know if I were Disney i'd simply make the two KotOR games into films, they're halfway there already and just need a competent hand to polish and distill.

[Fenixp]

(what is vader to him?).

He heard all about other grandpas and how they told their kids all those stories about their youth, so now he feels cheated.

 

I'm pretty sure there's a proper motivation somewhere, but they would have done well to communicate it properly straight away instead of presumably saving it for next episodes - as it stands, villain just felt bizarre to the viewer, he was neither relatable nor threatening.

[Raithe]

I'm guessing that whole Vader as the big, strong, enforcer type who was helping bring order to a chaotic and corrupt galaxy. Not someone distracted by petty weaknesses, but ruthlessly capable kind of thing.

 

Think about it, you're a confused adolescent who found out you have this great power.. Your mother is this heroic member of the government who is always busy saving other people, and your father keeps wandering off for excitement with his best friend. You get dumped on your uncle to train, but you're struggling with self-identity, worried about being considered weak, and then along comes someone to tell you about your grandfather. The man who was an iron fist and provided stability and was respected by the people he worked with....

 

Edit:

 

Also:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPV9NNvtL20

Edited December 20, 2015 by Raithe

[Drowsy Emperor]

I'm guessing that whole Vader as the big, strong, enforcer type who was helping bring order to a chaotic and corrupt galaxy. Not someone distracted by petty weaknesses, but ruthlessly capable kind of thing.

 

Think about it, you're a confused adolescent who found out you have this great power.. Your mother is this heroic member of the government who is always busy saving other people, and your father keeps wandering off for excitement with his best friend. You get dumped on your uncle to train, but you're struggling with self-identity, worried about being considered weak, and then along comes someone to tell you about your grandfather. The man who was an iron fist and provided stability and was respected by the people he worked with....

 

 

Admirable work, but you know... none of that was even hinted at in the film. Instead they had him wrecking computer consoles like a spoiled brat and, well, failing at everything while Han and Leia discuss the whole thing of how their son went astray but without giving much of a background.

 

It was pretty clear why Anakin became Vader, having suffered a lot and loved (too) much while being slowly corrupted by Palpatine - even if the transformation was filled with some ham-handed moments and Christensen's atrocious acting (from an admittedly bad script). Of course, we didn't know any of that in the first SW film, but neither was the character introduced in a transitory state - he was the "ultimate badass" and that was enough - for a while anyway and fleshed out later.

 

This guy... is a mystery, as in inexplicable - not the good kind. Not the kind that is going to be easily explained away.

 

Actually all of the bad guys in the film were surprisingly bad, considering how many Sith villains were made over the years and ripe for plucking from the comics and such. Worst of all was the dude giving the speech, looking like a gestapo wannabe. The female stormtrooper did nothing the whole film, and Snoke... well... yeah. There were four of them and they look and behave like kids (and are actually far too young for their roles) compared to Vader, his generals (who were all, you know, grown men, even with the portrayed ineptitude), Boba Fett and the emperor.

Edited December 21, 2015 by Drowsy Emperor

[Hurlshort]

So the consensus seems to be good but not great?

I wouldn't read too much into this thread. Most of the folks that enjoyed it posted such and then left. I would call it a great movie, and that seems to be supported by critics and al the non-internet people I know.

[Raithe]

It does capture a lot of the magic of the original films. It is good in its own right.

 

But I find I can't qualify it as great due to the lack of appropriate music and that it is so much of a re-tread of what has been done before.

[Calax]

Thinking on it... can i just say the political landscape of this is, quite confusing. There's the Republic (which is 5 planets), the new Order (a maybe-cult) and the Resistance (to the aforementioned cult).

 

As to the Order, The more I think about it, the more I think that the military leader should have been older. I could accept Ren being younger due to the nature of his character and him having powers, but the General needed to be old enough that this didn't feel like "two frat bro's teaming up to take on the galaxy (with an army)." Even somebody like Alec Baldwin in that role would have made more sense (not much, but more).

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

Yeah, I think the villains weren't very good. Kylo Ren is an edgy teenager who never grew out of larping as Stalin. Supreme leader whatever is just a hologram, although props if it's a WoO sort of thing. Captain Phasma didn't do anything. The General did a speech and got blown up.

 

Granted I don't think Abrams is the best director to flesh out characters in 2 hours balanced with loads of effects and Johnson can probably do a better job with the villains in the next movie. Especially if he focuses on Ren and Phasma while letting the Emperor stand in wait till IX.

[Drowsy Emperor]

I'm nineteen years old and a movie like this is one of the reasons everyone hates on my generation. This is mainly because the role of the mentor, so cherished in the Star Wars universe, was made to look entirely unnecessary. I mean, it took Luke failure after failure before he could deflect those training lasers with his father's lightsaber; a new weapon clumsy in his hands. And if it wasn't for old Ben Kenobi in his head would he have switched off his targeting computer and known that the force would be with him, always? Or what about those painful days training on Dagobah, which wouldn't inaugurate Luke as a Jedi until frustration and failure at a critical moment? Luke Skywalker's quest to become a Jedi was one ridden with struggle and redemption. Not so, it seems, for our new protagonist, Rey. It appears as though she doesn't need a mentor when she can apparently call upon the force at random to mind-trick storm troopers and win a lightsaber duel. She defeats an antagonist whom from what I can tell has trained with the force for years, even though just a few days ago she was scrounging Star Destroyer debris. In the words of Han Solo: "That's not how the force works." The movie seems to forget who Luke's character was when modeling Rey after him. Sitting in the theater I felt myself sarcastically thinking that Luke wasn't so great after all while watching Rey slash through Kylo's armor and Poe Dameron miraculously blow up a space station a hundred times the size of the death star. I guess we're just trying to show all you old farts out there that we the millenials don't need a teacher or a wise one in our lives to be the best. Anybody can pick up Anakin's lightsaber and be a winner. At least, that's what it felt like watching this movie.

 

 

This thing bugged me subconsciously during the movie, and the kid who wrote the review was spot on.

[Blarghagh]

Thinking on it... can i just say the political landscape of this is, quite confusing. There's the Republic (which is 5 planets), the new Order (a maybe-cult) and the Resistance (to the aforementioned cult).

 

As to the Order, The more I think about it, the more I think that the military leader should have been older. I could accept Ren being younger due to the nature of his character and him having powers, but the General needed to be old enough that this didn't feel like "two frat bro's teaming up to take on the galaxy (with an army)." Even somebody like Alec Baldwin in that role would have made more sense (not much, but more).

I love the effect Dawson Casting has had on cinema. Frat boys! Domnhall Gleeson and Adam Driver are both in their thirties.

[Calax]

 

Thinking on it... can i just say the political landscape of this is, quite confusing. There's the Republic (which is 5 planets), the new Order (a maybe-cult) and the Resistance (to the aforementioned cult).

 

As to the Order, The more I think about it, the more I think that the military leader should have been older. I could accept Ren being younger due to the nature of his character and him having powers, but the General needed to be old enough that this didn't feel like "two frat bro's teaming up to take on the galaxy (with an army)." Even somebody like Alec Baldwin in that role would have made more sense (not much, but more).

I love the effect Dawson Casting has had on cinema. Frat boys! Domnhall Gleeson and Adam Driver are both in their thirties.

 

Yes and no. They might be in their thirties but the dynamic they had was like that of two old frat bros who are now running the snowboard shop that they worked at during college. I realize that JJ was trying for a Tarkin/Vader dynamic, but part of the reason that worked was because you could believe Peter Cushing could command an entire armada. The guy they got for the "General" could have been replaced with Channing Tatum (technically 3 years older than the guy they got) with almost no effect.

 

The guy literally commands an entire planet plus an extensive military force. If you want me to take him more seriously, he needs to look and act like he's had a longer career (unless you go out of your way to explain why he's in charge, which they didn't).

[Blarghagh]

I think you imposed that Tarkin/Vader dynamic upon it rather than it actually being there, because I felt this was far closer to Hitler Jugend than actual military leaders.

[Drowsy Emperor]

The point is he doesn't look or act the role of a military leader. 

[Calax]

The point is he doesn't look or act the role of a military leader. 

Or even of somebody with the authority to kill planets. And while I am viewing this with the Tarkin/Vader view, that's because that's the closest thing within the franchise to this dynamic. Honestly he looks and acts more like he was the PR guy than the actual leader...

[Hurlshort]

Well we could probably read the book for more background, but It has pretty mwdiocre reviews.

[Drowsy Emperor]

Its part of a general trend of having young actors replace everyone unless absolutely necessary. How often do you now a see a full cast of grown men in a film? Like in the Indiana Jones movies? If you're over forty, or you look it - you're not going to get a part most of the time.  

 

Society wide obsession with youth, flawless good looks, abs on men, perfectly thin women etc..

 

If you don't believe me, check out how older women now dress. Exactly the same as the 20 year old girls for the most part. 

 

 

Naturally, having baby faced young men playing galactic leaders and villains is going to be laughable. Its like the superhero nonsense - a power trip for teenagers, getting to be something for nothing, skilled, powerful, experienced - but without all the work that goes into actually becoming it. Wrecking skyscrapers, beating up whole gangs and monsters without messing up your hair, clothes and good looks in the process.

Edited December 21, 2015 by Drowsy Emperor

[Guard Dog]

Well we could probably read the book for more background, but It has pretty mwdiocre reviews.

Yeah from the reviews I read on Amazon it added nothing to the story but a few sparse background details. Out of all six novelizations the only one that worked well was Revenge of the Sith. It really fleshed out the story. It used a 2nd person omnipotent viewpoint really well and that is such a clunky storytelling method the fact it was done well is saying something.  The rest were little more than re-written screenplays which is what Force Awakens sounds like.

[Orogun01]

Its part of a general trend of having young actors replace everyone unless absolutely necessary. How often do you now a see a full cast of grown men in a film? Like in the Indiana Jones movies? If you're over forty, or you look it - you're not going to get a part most of the time.  

 

Society wide obsession with youth, flawless good looks, abs on men, perfectly thin women etc..

 

If you don't believe me, check out how older women now dress. Exactly the same as the 20 year old girls for the most part. 

 

 

Naturally, having baby faced young men playing galactic leaders and villains is going to be laughable. Its like the superhero nonsense - a power trip for teenagers, getting to be something for nothing, skilled, powerful, experienced - but without all the work that goes into actually becoming it. Wrecking skyscrapers, beating up whole gangs and monsters without messing up your hair, clothes and good looks in the process.

First, the only ones obsessed with youth are Hollywood and aging floozies that rely on their good looks to get by.

 

Secondly, I would definitively welcome a return to normal physiques and normal people that actually make believe I'm seeing something real rather than a myth.

 

Thirdly, most people go to the movies to watch the special effects. Unless its a softcore porno for women, then they do indeed go for the looks.

[Oerwinde]

 

 

I wonder why the big bad is so poorly done. How did they come up with the idea of calling the ultimate bad guy Snoke, make him look like Gollum with the oversize hologram and all.

 

I mean you can take your pick of the evil Kotor characters and every single one is more fearsome, including granny Kreia.

From what little I saw of him when not snoozing I was similarly unimpressed, but the thought of Kreia being the antagonist instead...you know if I were Disney i'd simply make the two KotOR games into films, they're halfway there already and just need a competent hand to polish and distill.

HK-47 on film... Did not know I wanted this until now.

[Rostere]

 

I think Kylo Ren does make an interesting character. Taking a step back to look at it all,  He is a conflicted character. He feels the good inhimself, but wants to be Vader. It's why he loses to Rey. He's not fully commited, trying to convince himself he's as badass as Vader, but isn't. He can't handle adversity. When an enemy he expects to be a push over holds their ground, he's afraid.  Rey has that moment where she connects to the force, and it's from that that she pushes back and he loses his confidence. Before that point, he was using the pain of his wound to feed into his anger and force use. When his confidence shakes, he loses that and gets his ass kicked.

 

When he has the helmet on, he's pushing the whole Vader vibe. But when Vader would have killed a nearby Imperial for failure, he just throws a tantrum and damages the room he happens to be in. Very much the adolescent style.   Whenever you have those scenes where his helmet is off, it's deliberately showing him as that more humanised, young, not as confident as he tries to appear.

 

Edit: And for the other Star Wars related news..

 

Something David Prowse mentioned:

 

Disney changes it's policy on costumes in the parks.

Guests ages 14 years and older will no longer be permitted to wear costumes into the theme parks.

Disney said it is also discontinuing the sale of toy guns, including toy blasters and squirt guns on Disneyland Resort/Walt Disney World property and are no longer permitting these items to be brought into theme parks.

...

 

The reason, according to Disney, is to ensure a toy gun doesn’t cause distraction or confusion for employees and security personnel in the parks.

 

 

I think it was a good idea to have a villain who isn't completely evil, but he shouldn't have had a helmet from the start. It makes him look like a tryhard. And he shouldn't be so embarrassingly verbose about his inner struggle, it should have just been acted out, implied - and not as an abstract conflict of light and dark, but rather his love for his family vs his (totally unexplained and unfounded) desire to be like vader (what is vader to him?).

 

It would have spared us sentences like "I feel the pull of the light". 

 

 

Thinking on it... can i just say the political landscape of this is, quite confusing. There's the Republic (which is 5 planets), the new Order (a maybe-cult) and the Resistance (to the aforementioned cult).

 

As to the Order, The more I think about it, the more I think that the military leader should have been older. I could accept Ren being younger due to the nature of his character and him having powers, but the General needed to be old enough that this didn't feel like "two frat bro's teaming up to take on the galaxy (with an army)." Even somebody like Alec Baldwin in that role would have made more sense (not much, but more).

I love the effect Dawson Casting has had on cinema. Frat boys! Domnhall Gleeson and Adam Driver are both in their thirties.

 

Yes and no. They might be in their thirties but the dynamic they had was like that of two old frat bros who are now running the snowboard shop that they worked at during college. I realize that JJ was trying for a Tarkin/Vader dynamic, but part of the reason that worked was because you could believe Peter Cushing could command an entire armada. The guy they got for the "General" could have been replaced with Channing Tatum (technically 3 years older than the guy they got) with almost no effect.

 

The guy literally commands an entire planet plus an extensive military force. If you want me to take him more seriously, he needs to look and act like he's had a longer career (unless you go out of your way to explain why he's in charge, which they didn't).

 

No, I don't think JJ was trying for a Vader/Tarkin relation between the two. There is some amount of friction between them and in that sense it is more like Vader/Jerjerrod. Anyway I don't think we should impose an interpretation that everything in TFA is like something in the OT, because more often than not elements of TFA are opposites in some sense of the OT.

 

Kylo is meant to look young and inexperienced, the entire point of his character is that he IS a try-hard who desperately wants to become as powerful as Vader, but is also afraid that he can't do it. I think it feels very fresh to have a villain which is so clearly fueled by an inferiority complex - they have clearly thought long and well about what it takes for a person to do the things he does, although this can of course be ruined by flashbacks in later movies. Clearly Kylo has the power and authority to do some pretty evil stuff, but he is also very pathetic in some sense, especially when he does not have his mask on (both Poe, Han and Rey call him out on this in the movie). Essentially, the real-world counterparts to Kylo are people like Varg Vikernes, Eric Harris/Dylan Klebold and Anders Breivik - Kylo is very much designed to be a character which makes sense IRL, which makes him infinitely darker than any previous Star Wars villains who pretty much are evil because the script said so. I'm just hoping that they will continue on this line and ignore any SJ complaints about Kylo Ren painting a bad picture of the mentally ill.

Snoke is clearly overhyping Kylo's importance and setting him up for some kind of betrayal. Even Han says as much, and he may have more information than the viewer. My guess is that Kylo will either die a pathetic death being used by Snoke, or be redeemed, or both.

 

You could argue that Hux is unrealistically young to be the leader of a big military movement, but I think you mistaken with regards to what they are trying to show with the First Order. The First Order are pretty much the scraps of the Imperium, specifically those scraps who were ideologically motivated enough to covertly fight on, not necessarily at all their finest generals (who in any case might be professionals who are not ideologically motivated). The First Order has not seen much action and so meritocracy has not played it's part yet. It is specifically stated that Hux has little or no practical military experience and that he earned his place through blood ties, which at least fits very well with my conception of the First Order being an ad-hoc organization of Imperial remnants where the pecking order is decided by who brought the most resources for the cause. For me personally, the aristocratic Hux sort of darkly mirrors the aristocratic Leia in the OT. And if anything, it was also ****ing retarded that a 18-year old girl was a senior diplomat.

[Namutree]

 

 

 

I think it was a good idea to have a villain who isn't completely evil, but he shouldn't have had a helmet from the start. It makes him look like a tryhard. 

 

He kind of is a tryhard, and a lame one at that. I like him more when he isn't cosplaying as a generic dark side guy.

[FlintlockJazz]

Finally got to see it last night, when I took my two nieces and brother-in-law to see it.  It was a good film, awesome in fact, or rather it would have been had they not made one fatal mistake that destroyed the entire film and in fact every film ever!  Not enough Artoo!!  God dam it, two scenes for the one character that the entire film franchise has been about, really?  I mean, he is the main character right?

 

Edited December 21, 2015 by FlintlockJazz

[Blarghagh]

Its part of a general trend of having young actors replace everyone unless absolutely necessary. How often do you now a see a full cast of grown men in a film? Like in the Indiana Jones movies? If you're over forty, or you look it - you're not going to get a part most of the time.  

 

Society wide obsession with youth, flawless good looks, abs on men, perfectly thin women etc..

 

If you don't believe me, check out how older women now dress. Exactly the same as the 20 year old girls for the most part. 

 

 

Naturally, having baby faced young men playing galactic leaders and villains is going to be laughable. Its like the superhero nonsense - a power trip for teenagers, getting to be something for nothing, skilled, powerful, experienced - but without all the work that goes into actually becoming it. Wrecking skyscrapers, beating up whole gangs and monsters without messing up your hair, clothes and good looks in the process.

While I feel like you're ridiculously overstating this and obviously bringing your own baggage of inferiority, I did watch Ghostbusters recently and realized there will never again be a movie cast quite like that.

 

The point is he doesn't look or act the role of a military leader.

Yes, but my point was exactly that? He's Hitler Jugend. He's a fresh faced true believer for Snoke to use as he will, and he brought his own contigent of resoc'd space marines with him. He's not there to be a leader - he considers his troops to be self-sufficient which comes back to bite him in the butt when Finn betrays him. I've got no issues with either Hux or Kylo Ren's age, my issue with the villains is that Snoke didn't feel threatening. If Snoke felt threatening, they would have. Instead, Snoke is 100% reactionary and not a plot driving force in this movie.

Edited December 21, 2015 by TrueNeutral