Star Wars The Force Awakens discussion (SPOILERS OBVIOUSLY)

That'll do Abrams... That'll do...

Needless to say we will be discussing Star Wars the Force Awakens and specific scenes that occur in the movie, so if you have not seen it yet... Go watch it and then come back to read.

Continuing on from this point you are only going to get a shit load of spoilers!!!

You have been warned





Being an ex-Star Wars freak, I felt a bit apprehensive when it was announced years ago that this was going to happen... I had been hurt before ¬.¬ and kinda wanted them to just leave Star Wars be, rather than risk fudging it up yet again. But then the trailers came out and looked promising, the noise on the day after release seemed encouraging. I went into the cinema with growing excitement that I was desperately trying to tone down and came out wanting to see the next installment immediately.

In general... Without George Lucas at the reigns, I did not get rammed with a faceful of overly colourful CGI... There wasn't annoying slap stick comedy going on in the background like the main characters just happened to be walking past an alien circus tent... The humor was in much better taste then the prequels and potentially funnier then the originals. The actors did not make me want to give them a Glaswegian kiss (Hayden Christensen I'm looking at you ¬.¬ ), instead Rey and Fin were easy characters to get behind thanks to Daisy Ridley and John Boyega. The feel was just right... There was even small things like how Rey responded to a non desert planet (something that they didn't even do with Luke in the originals)

It wasn't perfect, I personally have a couple of things that bugged me but I feel that I am mainly nitpicking... Plus some of these bugs I can easily explain away myself... Eg. I initially felt that Fin was too eager to save Rey considering he didn't want to go back to the First Order, but then I guess you could liken that to Luke Skywalker feeling drawn to save Leia when he had only seen a holographic projection of her.

Also the main complaint for most people has been that the film was too much like A New Hope... I guess the elements were there, so you could say they cheated a little. It didn't really bother me when I watched it though.



There was a few things/scenes in particular that I wanted to give a shout out to:

Kylo Ren
You start off with a bad ass evil guy, similar to Darth Vader in a way... dressed in black and feared by even his own men.

Then the unmasking happened fairly early on and I found myself feeling disappoint... It kinda dispelled all the menace behind him. Instead of evil and feared "Kylo Ren", he was just some boy... Then something else happened. The evil villain became a person. When I think about Darth Vader in Star Wars a New Hope, what do you actually learn about him in that one film? Do you see any conflict in his character? No he's just there to be evil, you don't know much about him other then he killed Luke's father and was trained by Obi Wan (not that I'm saying Darth Vader wasn't a good character, just it takes a while to find out about him). Kylo Ren showed that he wasn't just some unstoppable malevolent dark jedi, his "evilness" was flawed and he had internal conflict... This was awesome


Han Solo
Having Han back in this film was great... And it wasn't like he was just there because they wanted one of the original cast to tag along with the adventure... He was integral to the plot. Then it happened; As soon as he called out to his son while they were standing on that walkway.... over a conveniently deep pit of pearl... and with (What I feel to be) a distinct lack of regulatory health and safety hand railings... I thought "Oh shit.. he's dead man.." and I was ready to be all upset about them killing off such a great character, but in sacrificing such a big character the film had the kind of emotional bite that it couldn't really have gotten from killing off a character that we'd only just been introduced to... It felt like the stakes got way bigger when that happened

Besides that I believe Harrison Ford didn't want to do further movies and he's getting on in age now anyway...


The lightsaber fights
The prequels lightsaber fights look awesome, but with all of the choreographed flips and spins I always felt that you lost something in pivotal fights like the one between Anakin and Obi Wan. It might sound weird, but it was almost like it didn't mean anything... When Darth Vader indicates to Luke in Return of the Jedi that he will turn his sister to the dark side, Luke loses it and just wails of Vader.. Swinging his lightsaber frantically and it was the most emotional moment in a star wars lightsaber fight (in my opinion). In the Force Awakens, the down play the choreography... Rey and Fin are both untrained with a lightsaber and Kylo Ren's training is not complete so it makes sense that they wouldn't be flash. The resulting fight looks gritty and clumsy, but perfectly in place (all things considered). This is very promising for future battles


There's a lot more I want to talk about (including theories for whats next in Episode 8 ) but this is too long as it is...

I'm just going to keep my point short.

Spoilers of course

Spoiler:

Although I noticed the similarities afterwards... It still didn't bother me...

What actually bothered me more was the fact that they didn't really explain why the First Order was so powerful... Didn't the rebels crush the Empire a few years prior? Didn't they notice that they were making another weapon of mass destruction? It's not like it was small ¬.¬

It should be the other way around.. Good guys strong and the bad guys getting stronger in the background

I heard a rumor (so take this with a grain of salt) that this all takes place in the outer rim. So the inner core is controlled by the Republic (former Rebels). Thus, the First Order and the resistance are waging war in the outer core instead of the inner core. Since the outer core isn't part of the Republic, the Republic is not allowed to directly interfere but it decides to secretly support the resistance with funding.

Ok well the planet the first order destroyed was NOT Couruscant. The center for republic politics was moved to another core world.

Also 20 bucks says rey is a skywalker

Well they blew up 5 planets with one attack.

This answers some of the questions I had regarding the state of the Republic, Resistance and First Order at the start of The Force Awakens

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/New_Republic

SleeperAgent94 wrote:Ok well the planet the first order destroyed was NOT Couruscant. The center for republic politics was moved to another core world.

Also 20 bucks says rey is a skywalker

That seemed to be what they were implying, which makes me think that's probably not the case.

Well why else would Rey be so strong in the force that she can pull off the mindtrick AND beat a dark sider with NO training?

SleeperAgent94 wrote:Well why else would Rey be so strong in the force that she can pull off the mindtrick AND beat a dark sider with NO training?

I'm not denying it's a logical conclusion, I'm just saying it's so obvious that I wouldn't be surprised if it was a swerve.

She could just be some new, special Force thing completely unrelated to Luke for all anyone knows.