I don’t get all the hate for it being a “remake” of Star Wars. I don’t think it mirrored that film any more than Terminator 2 mirrors the first Terminator. It hits all the same beats, but does so in a new way, and has a generally different feeling and tone to it.
I really, really liked TFA. It was a fun watch, and made me even more excited for VIII than I already was from my love of Rian Johnson.
The movie made me feel something - I felt excited, scared, tense, a lot of the same feelings I got from watching the OT. Of course it’s no ESB, but in my eyes, no movie ever will be.
I really didn’t care that it didn’t make perfect sense. I’m with Frink’s view in a different (terrible) thread that it’s just a movie and sometimes logical leaps are necessary, but I don’t think that’s the full picture. Some movies rely on the plot’s complexity to entertain, and those do need to be airtight. If you’re watching a movie and focusing on its logos, critiques like the ones I’m seeing - that the Millennium Falcon happened to be on Jaaku, that the tie fighter happened to crash in quicksand, that Maz happened to have the lightsaber - are perfectly valid.
But watching any Star Wars movie with a focus on logos over pathos is a mistake - that’s not what these movies are about. Star Wars has always been at its best when it comes to big emotions. Nobody complains when Luke happens to crash walking distance from Yoda’s hut in ESB, because how Luke gets there isn’t what the movie’s about.
Granted, there’s a few more moments like this in the new film than the OT, and I wouldn’t rank it close to Star Wars or ESB, but it’s still my view that if those things really bothered you enough to where you hated this movie as much as the prequels, I don’t understand what you liked about the Original Trilogy.
Is this not possibly due in large part to the fact that the Terminator franchise deals with, at it’s heart, time travel…? So a re-casting of events seemingly falls almost entirely within the scope of it’s core narrative…
At any rate I am well pleased that you enjoyed the film…