Kellythatsit said:
To simply highlight one as a rehash or some kind of fan service seems wilfully dismissive.
Well, it absolutely is wilfully dismissive towards the movie. I don’t have anything at all with people who rightfully enjoy it though.
Take TPM, compare it to SW and you can see two totally different approaches of a mentor’s death. Old sworn-to-death enemies meet again for a last time, with one sacrificing himself and helmeted one not repenting at all vs random unrelated evil guys just beats the mentor due to better skills. Fact is, both mentors die, that’s what moves the plot forward from a certain point of view that thinks of joseph cambell as an ultimate guide and sole man on earth to have thought and synthetized myths
Yet, TFA’s confrontation…it is and feels like a rehash to me. I just don’t buy characters actually believing their own self-explanatory lies.
I find the whole “anakin skywalker is dead” to be ridiculous. It is and has always been supposed to be a metaphora. Vader says I am your father. He has always recognized himself as Anakin Skywalker. From there on, it’s easy to guess how that whole thing about Han “not being his father anymore” just sounds to me. He hates him/looks for him/wants/needs to kill him /because he is his father/. The rest is just shit the characters say, but not stuff we are supposed to believe as viewers.
In SW77 there were lots of implications that the duel was important. Vader anounces it to Tarkin. Leia implies Obi Wan as a great warrior. Vader himself states we meet again at last. But it just happens anywhere, wherever they just happen to meet.
ESB, Vader set up a trap and prepared the place.
In TFA, however, they apparently meet randomly in that casually particular location…What I tried to say is that there was a strange sense of matter-of-factness in Star Wars 77 that just got lost after ESB’s reveal, only to be recovered perhaps by Rogue One at some point: great feats just can happen anywhere to almost anyone. That’s some kind of a nice spirit for a fairy tale movie. The rest is just the desperate need of cool epic epicness milenials want over everything just because they more and more seem unable to process information that isn’t underlined by context.