YMMV of couse, but it felt so much more earned here by and large. Apart from the big ones that are in every film anyway (Wilhelm, bad feeling), they're by and large casual and/or appropriate (two examples from the Falcon: the gas masks/smuggling compartments make perfect sense in context, while Finn throwing away the remote for a split second doesn't detract anything or become overly wink wink). Whereas in Genysis they're shoving it in your face so obnoxiously, being as dramatic as possible about stuff like rehashing COME WITH ME IF YOU WANNA LIVE to make sure the audience got it. It's lazy and exploitative, where TFA is far more playful and tries to throw in callbacks that make sense in the context of the scene.

Were there still too many? Yeah, probably. But no one bellowed an iconic line from the previous films at the camera apropos of nothing, they didn't shove them in your face, and on the whole it felt like something being done out of love rather than checking the boxes for the applause opening night.

Also, Genysis' script was a piece of shit otherwise whereas TFA has plenty of great original dialogue to balance out the throwbacks (Poe's "Who talks first? You talk first, I talk first?" is one of my new favorite SW funny moments.)

Last edited by Abbie (2015-12-18 22:34:43)

I think the idea might be that there's something inside Finn that makes him recoil from slaughtering villagers (as opposed to harming someone who's trying to do you harm in a battle), something that the "programming" storm troopers get couldn't stamp out. We may well learn about his past and learn where that thing in him comes from, who put it there. It's when the order to kill the non-resisting villagers gets handed down--that moment--that you see him realize not that he doesn't want to do it, but that he can't do it. There's a difference between being a soldier and being a murderer.

Leia consoles Rey who...she's never met before? But we'd all console Rey, right?

How did Poe get off Jakku? Why not just take the droid off the girl instead of offer her 60 portions?

The council scene where they're planning the attack on the star-killer base was like a piss-take self-parody. Like in Spectre, Bond shoots at a pipe with a pistol and the entire base blows up.

The tentacled creatures on the loose in that ship reminded me of the Cabin in the Woods scene.

Yeah, Star Wars IV amazing at the time (I was 7, the perfect demographic) as we'd never seen that level of spectacle before, but today we've seen greater spectacle e.g. Return of the King, so VII was underwhelming from that point of new. We've even seen collapsing planets before in JJ's Star Trek.

Is it hype or just the fact it's not Ep1-bad? That's a low benchmark. We'll see how this stands the test of time. It's good enough to whet the appetite for VIII. Overall, it's a nice setup for a new trilogy, but it's not ground-breaking on any level.

I don't think it's much of a stretch to just assume he headed in a different direction than Finn did and found transport offworld at another village.

I'd bet dollars to doughnuts there's a deleted scene showing Poe's escape from the wreckage and getting off of the planet.

There you go. I stand corrected. Thank you.

I forgot the biggest WTF moment for me: it was Chewie not getting the captain's chair of the Falcon after Han is gone. I get it -- people still want to get some mileage out of their Chewie is My Co-pilot t-shirts and bumper stickers. But that just seemed wrong. He should have inherited that captain's seat. It could have been a moment.

And it did a great job of showing the scale of the things. The Empire built them BIG and you could see that here. Though the shots of the First Order destroyer were impressive too, with how close the Falcon flew to it, and of course that opening shot. Took me a while to figure out exactly what was happening there.

But they got the formula. Crawl, tilt down, enter a Star Destroyer.

I imagine the boss had been told the First Order wanted it, preferably without a ruckus; either that or "no ruckus" was just his preference. After he couldn't get it through that, and knowing Rey is damn good with her staff, he just called in the First Order to take care of the job instead of getting his own head busted in. Smart move.

As far as Poe getting off Jakku, I imagine it'll be the subject of a short, mayyybe a spinoff, or almost certainly a book. But it was one of the loose ends that wanted you to just go with it.

Anyone got any ideas about this enigmatic map? Who drew the map? Why? Why was it in two pieces? How did Max have it? It's like JJ had a script meeting: let's make the map the MacGuffin...great idea!
But then then they forgot to fill in the details/context.

I'm going back and forth on whether to rate this movie higher than RotJ. That one had an incredible climax mixed with a wildly uneven everything else, while TFA, for me, is a mostly awesome everything else mixed in with a half-lackluster climax. I think TFA has the edge in that, in RotJ, all the interesting character action happens in the throne room, whereas TFA is filled with nothing *but* interesting/endearing characters. We forgive RotJ largely because of one sequence (well, two, the space battle and the throne room are distinct), while imo TFA only has one sequence that needs forgiveness (the almost-afterthought of the fighter attack on Starkiller Base). And even though it's a major flaw, I can already tell on the rewatch that'll matter less because I'm so eager to experience Rey and Finn and Poe and Kylo again.

Last edited by Abbie (2015-12-19 08:12:51)

I'm gonna go out on a limb and say there's one aspect where the Prequels were better than Ep7, and that's the score. The prequel scores had some great new themes e.g Duel of the Fates. I couldn't detect any iconic new themes. It was more a copy-and-paste rehash. I'll have to hear it some more.

Even the Hobbit scores, also paling in comparison to LOTR, had a few good new cues (Misty Mountains, Starlight), but so far the Ep7 score leaves me cold. Williams is old though.

I'm hoping Rey isn't an Anakin descendant too. An issue I had with the prequels was too much small world syndrome. Give us some truly fresh blood here.

I need to watch it again. In general I'm not great at picking out new themes - I didn't "recognize" Battle of the Heroes as a new great theme until repeat viewings of the movie after having listened to the soundtrack, and for the longest time I associated Duel of the Fates with pod racing because it was the menu music for Star Wars Racer.

I don't know, until later in the film, I wanted to believe Ren was Jacen, and Rey was Jaina, or, at least, inspired by them, inheriting the names and all. Of course, when Han shouts BEN, that theory went out the window, but at least they kept one of the EU names, as Ben Skywalker was Luke's sun in the "Legends".
After that theory bombed, I still have some idea that Rey might be Luke's daughter, and nobody told her. If she's younger than Ben, it has the potential to make some sort of sense that she was hidden from him, and shielded from the Skywalker Curse, or something.

But then again, she isn't, judging by appearances, younger than him, and it doesn't work.

Eh, we'll see.

One theory I've had for a decade or so, seemed to be confirmed by VII, though. Lightsabers. New ones have stable cores and don't flicker, whereas older ones seem to become more unstable, and flicker a bit. Look at the OT; all sabers in there are old, and flickering. In the PT, where they're mostly new sabers, they're all stable as hell. Even Anakin's saber was steady until it had been locked away and not used for 20 years.

Well, it's something.

I do agree that the dogfights seemed a tad last minute. There's not a lot of info on Starkiller Base, apart from how it got its literal name, and it's wasted in that sense. "Oh, look, we one upped the Death Star with a fucking PLANET. Guess you're pretty fucked now- oh, wait, damn, you broke that too. Next time we're just using fighters, that seems like a better tactic."