It's never been suggested in Star Wars that human Jedi's are "genetically superior". Do you think that any person in any fiction with abilities different to the norm might be accused of being "fascist"? What definition of the term are you using?
Maybe "fascism"* isn't the correct term but I think it is certainly suggested that midichlorians maketh a Jedi, and also that strong Jedi run in families (hence it is genetic.) Those two things seem at odds, but then much of 'Star Wars' doesn't really work.
*The Nazis did believe in genetic superiority and they were fascists.
It's never been suggested in Star Wars that human Jedi's are "genetically superior". Do you think that any person in any fiction with abilities different to the norm might be accused of being "fascist"? What definition of the term are you using?
I like heroic types but Star Wars all getting a bit dubious with this family of Übermenschen deciding the fate of millions/billions without anyone questioning their authority. All the discussions I have seen say that Rey is Luke's daughter and has inherited her father's (and grandfather's) spooky action at a distance abilities - and inheritance is genetic. And painting the villains blacker doesn't make our heroes any less culpable. It's not new to Star Wars. SF has been playing the neo-fascist, might-is-right race card for generations. (All Klingon's are inherently Warlike? Yeah, I know it's a convenient story-telling short-cut but so was the deeply racist comedy cowardliness of Stepin Fetchit and Eddie 'Rochester' Anderson).
Not new in SF. It's been there ever since Kimble Kinnison and the other Lensmen dispensed with any kind of due process and just blew up entire planets, because they didn't like the way they looked at them (or the way they made their money). Star Wars is a direct ancestor of that kind of blow it up first and not bother talking about it afterwards 30s pulp nonsense.
Saw it last night, and to me it was almost a complete rehash of A New Hope.
Empire go looking for a spy, who packs off their secret in a moving toy commercial lovable droid? Check.
Same scene is where we see Darth Vader Kylo Ren being badass and interrogating/killing people? Check.
Said droid wanders around Tatooine Jukka until he happens to run into someone who can help him? Check.
Mentor figure encountered when our protagonists get into trouble? Check.
They go to a dubious cantina looking for someone who can help them? Check.
They have to exit said dubious location in some hurry because The Empire First Order were on their heels? Check.
Mentor figure dies in a confrontation with the apprentice sith? Check.
Final battle ends with a trench run to destroy the Death Star Star Killer? Check.
Said run is to destroy a comparatively ludicrously small section that then takes out the entire thing? Check once more.
Added to that... Finn and Po crash land on a planet, and happen to end up within a day's walk of where they needed to be.
Death Star MK 3 can hit a five planets perfectly when shooting from system to system. I don't care if that thing shot faster than lightspeed, that thing's still gonna take time to arrive at its target, and planets tend to... Y'know... Move.
Added to THAT, Death Star MK 3 sucks up its own sun for power to the point where it goes out. Yet people can still travel the outside in normal clothes. And they can fire the thing twice.
And R2D2 had the map the entire time apart from one tiny piece. Maybe this is covered in the next film, but why wouldn't Luke just give R2 the entire map?
And finally, Kylo Ren was beaten WAY too easily for me. OK, he was injured... By something he could have stopped. OK, he had just
killed his own father
, but still he was beaten by an opponent who had literally only just awoken to the Force. How are we supposed to take him as a threat in the future when Rey has presumably had training? In contrast, Darth Vader would have killed Luke in A New Hope if they'd fought, and won a very one sided fight in Strikes Back. It was only after a lot of training and briefly turning dark that Luke was able to go toe to toe with him.
On the whole this annoyed me. It could have been really good, but it just had way too much dumb.
Just watched this for the second time, and enjoyed it much more - not least because there was no sense of trepidation and it was clear what I should expect.
It was also nice to see how the characters and events developed, knowing where they'd get up to.
However, it really is just a rewrite of the original Star Wars film, with additional imagery from Empire and Return. Even the musical cues were clear about that. Yet it was still also distinct and unique in its own right.
More importantly, it's formed a bridge between the older films, and what's going to come next - and I think we're going to start seeing some new and interesting directions.
Just watched this for the second time - I like to leave a lot of time between viewings of films I really enjoyed, so some elements of 'discovery' can still strike me: things I missed, things I can concentrate more on in the backgrounds etc. What struck me this time was how unconvincing the film seemed to be second time around. I know you suspend belief to a certain extent in the cinema and accept some scenarios as a given (as Memory Tale pointed out on Feb 13th) but whose story was it? Rey's? Han Solo's? Finn's? Kylo Ren's? In A New Hope, it was Luke's story - they stuck with him and introduced new characters to supplement the story, is that fair? For me, there were too many storylines that converged too clumsily, too conveniently. Have to blame the direction, but second time around there was no tension I could appreciate in the actors. Yes, they acted tense, but none of it came over convincingly. Harrison Ford did best IMO, and Carrie Fisher's acting was bloody awful. Blame the script? Han Solo's killed, she walks right past Chewie and hugs Rey.... what? Rey's grief for someone she's known 10 minutes was worse than Chewie's??? (and Kylo Ren's mind-extraction of her seeing Han as a father figure was horribly mawkish, and horribly clumsy) That was direction, obviously, but it made it seem amateurish. Likewise Poe's miraculous (and unseen) escape from the crash. Why invest a lot of time in a character at the beginning when he's not a main player? I'm getting a bit fed up of the X-wing sequences, too - the dialogue is repetitively inane - someone on the tail, cover me, I'm going in etc etc.
I'm really looking forward to Rogue One - new characters in a familiar setting, and so far, it looks like it will concentrate on Jyn Erso's character mostly. Fingers crossed...
interesting viewpoints on watching the movie for the second time, Brian and Boneman. not sure how i will see the movie watching it again outside the cinema. which might be why i feel no need to watch it again... i have a feeling i will pick up on the myriad flaws that i managed to gloss over in the enjoyment of the first time
This was something J.J. Abrams actually commented on, because it's a common nitpick.
"That was probably one of the mistakes I made in that. My thinking at the time was that Chewbacca, despite the pain he was feeling, was focused on trying to save Finn and getting him taken care of. So I tried to have Chewbacca go off with him and focus on Rey, and then have Rey find Leia and Leia find Rey. The idea being that both of them being strong with the Force and never having met, would know about each other — that Leia would have been told about her beyond what we saw onscreen and Rey of course would have learned about Leia. And that reunion would be a meeting and a reunion all in one, and a sort of commiseration of their mutual loss."
But Abrams realizes that some people saw it as a slight and admits that the real mistake may have been in how he blocked that shot:
"Had Chewbacca not been where he was, you probably wouldn’t have thought of it. But because he was right there, passed by Leia, it felt almost like a slight, which was definitely not the intention."
I watched it again, as my son (10) likes it. I thought on repeat viewing it was even worse than first impressions. Dreadful movie, makes the prequel trilogy look pretty good. Some of Lucas' ideas and translation to screen were kinda poor (Binks etc), but at least his vision was fairly consistent and the feel of the movies held together as having come from one mindset. This latest offering is soooo bad in so many ways, I wont rush out to see any more Disney SW. Which is very sad, given the original movie was the defining movie of my youth and I loved it.
My feeling is that its too convenient a story.
Yes there's the Force, but there were no reasons why a huge chain of events would happen to happen in a series to result in the direction it took other than the story forcing things.
Force sensitive girl happens to be on the same world where the fastest ship in the Galaxy got dumped to rust away; and she not only was on the same world but had worked on it.
Ok that might be passable (just) but then 5 seconds after taking off (and we are given to think that at least the engines have been fired up before) and Han and Chewy appear; not only do they appear, but they've also happened to lose their entire crew of their current ship AND 5 seconds after that get attacked by bandits that force them back onto the Falcon (not to mention the eat-first ask questions later beast fails to eat Finn and just carries him around).
It's an opened followed by even more convenient meetings that just feels like terribly lazy story telling and as if they knew where they wanted the film to end but had no clue how to get it there and thus forced the story. The original New Hope wasn't forced; there were chance meetings, but back then characters like Han and Chewy were just another pair of random smugglers - you can chance meet them without it feeling forced; but you can't chance meet them at the start of a new film in the way that they did.
Events were too convenient with little reasoning behind them. Heck even Finns defection is convenient. We see him go through one single battle (and not even much of a battle by empire standards). It's a single brutal firefight; but through that we are supposed to develop empathy for him. But I can't.
All I can see is a failed raised-from-birth killer who somehow had a huge revelation in a firefight. A simple quick "put to music" log of his upbringing and some hint at rebellion in his nature and we could have easily grown to understand that here was a person likely to defect and for good reasons inherent to his character. Instead he seems to defect because its very convenient to the story that he defects at that exact point in time.
And yes Chewy walking right by Leia was jarring; it made no sense that she didn't even reach out to him in that moment. Instead she reaches out to someone who she has hardly a passing acquaintance with. As if the last years of her life have left her with not a single friend or companion; it lowers her character to one of desperation which is demeaning to a character who originally was very strong.
I don't "hate" the film; but its one where my brain just can't shut off pointing out the difficulties. What's worse in my view is that instead of having a token fool (jarjar) to a backdrop of an otherwise generally sound story we instead got a story that was unappealing with a generally solid cast of characters (even if I feel many were not acting as well as they could have - although some of that might have been given to the script and scenes more than their talent).
I watched TFA again a few weeks ago, when I was home sick from work. I wasn't a massive fan when I first saw it (as is recorded earlier in this thread), and time certainly didn't approve my opinion. I tend to agree with all the holes pointed out in the previous few posts. This really was mediocre film-making at best, in my opinion. I think it was saved by being set in a beloved property with an immediate history of terrible and disappointing installments, so people were willing to ride the nostalgia wave and overlook the many flaws.
This latest offering is soooo bad in so many ways, I wont rush out to see any more Disney SW. Which is very sad, given the original movie was the defining movie of my youth and I loved it.
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