Jesus, so sorry to hear about this. As everyone else has said thus far, thoughts are with you.

Really minor, but I didn't want to post it in the chat in case it could be seen as a spoiler: just noticed the "Hyperspace" motif is in the background of the opening cue of the soundtrack at 3:05. Never would have noticed it without listening with headphones, super nice touch.

I tend to avoid Trek 09--it's one of the few movies I can successfully turn my brain off to enjoy, and Brian's incessant nitpicking and shitting on things that don't deserve to be shit on get frustrating.

Also, I tend to fast forward the color grading debate in the Malariathon. Sleep was little and tensions were high, I get that, but the lack of sentence-finishing and one side's talking past the other just get intensely irritating.

We should get Alex Ruger in here to hit us with some composer knowledge.

I agree that the score just isn't as memorable as any of the previous six. That said, I'm amazed it's as good as it is considering how old Williams is and how many ideas he must've run out of. I was saying for a while before Williams was announced that I would've liked to see Giacchino take it rather than the old maestro, but at the same time having one last hurrah with him in the form this trilogy is wonderful even if he's not as melodic as he used to be. And really, if we're being honest, not a lot of the original music for AotC or RotS was very melodic anyway. Each had one great theme (Across the Stars, Battle of the Heroes) and a lot of other music that was really nice without being particularly identifiable (ignoring the chopped-up TPM cues).

If Starkiller were the focus of the climax I'd be more inclined to agree, but it's not. It's the characters we're concerned about, and that forest duel is incredibly tense for that reason. The climax is about Ren, Finn and Rey and where they're going as characters, Starkiller is just an excuse to get them to that point.

As for the bad guys being stupid: even ignoring the fact that superpowers in the real world enjoy doing the same thing over and over again and being surprised when it doesn't work, the First Order being stupid in this regard makes sense. They're slavishly imitating and idolizing the old Empire, flaws and all. Does that make the movie perfect or fix the fact that another giant ball is a dumb idea? No, but I just don't understand someone saying Starkiller ruins the entire movie for them when there's so much goodness in the rest of it.

See, I just don't understand where you're coming from when you say it takes all its influences and synthesizes them into something new. That's exactly the opposite of what it does--it simply regurgitated its influences verbatim. Like I mentioned in the review, in description after description it simply pulls stuff like "It was like this thing from x movie" or "It looked like a Cylon", etc. Star Wars is absolutely indebted to its influences, but there's a huge amount of invention going on at the same time--the sheer visual creativity at play in the OT is one of its chief delights. I can enjoy that visual inventiveness and worldbuilding without having any knowledge of Hidden Fortress, but if I were to read RP1 without any context for the stuff it's referencing I would have absolutely no idea what the fuck things look like the majority of the time because it uses pre-existing works as a crutch rather than a foundation.

To address your point that there's a difference between good writing and good storytelling: I absolutely agree, and Tolkien is a good example. However, RP1's bad writing directly feeds into bad storytelling. For instance, when describing his girlfriend, the protagonist talks about how she made him a better person, opened his eyes, and in general "changed how I see the world". Does the book bother to actually show you any of this through their interactions? No, we're simply told it happens in spite of the fact that the protagonist remains basically the same character throughout the book. Cline's sloppy writing leads to sloppy storytelling which, to use the cliche, tells us an arc has happened rather than actually organically, plausibly showing it.

None of this is an attack on your love for the book--you liked it and I didn't and that's fine. I just genuinely don't understand what you mean when you say the book was magical, wholly new, or in any way a synthesis of influences rather than something that uses them as a crutch.

Looking forward to The Revenant, The Witch and Anomalisa, myself. Granted, two of the three are already in limited release but I'm not in the location to take advantage of that. Couldn't even tell you why I want to see The Witch, exactly, but I'm on a big horror kick and I tend to trust Drew McWeeny's opinion.