Movies show us some things and tell us others to paint the picture of the galaxy. The crawl is part of that. You cant take what the movies show and ignore what they tell and you can’t take what they tell and ignore what they show. Both parts go together to give us the setting and setup. The TFA crawl sets up the situation, just like the ANH crawl setup that situation. Both make it clear which side is wide spread and which side is fighting. In ANH, there are but two sides, the Empire and the Rebellion. In TFA there is the new Republic, the First Order, and the Resistance. The FO decapitates the Republic but has taken no action to invade. When are they doing that? Well, that so called throw away line from Rey where she says weeks. The way you guys are describing it, the First Order, just by destroying the Republic capital and fleet has taken over every planet in the Republic and that is very silly.
As for Starkiller base, just how many people were there? We don’t know. It obviously wasn’t the heart of the First Order. Snoke wasn’t there. So yeah, a lot of investment was destroyed, but their fleet wasn’t nor was their home base. And we still don’t know where that is.
How you are reading this nonsense into two movies that very clearly are giving us as much data as the OT ever did and which OT fans have pulled out and poured over for decades is beyond me. I know you have issues with the movie(s), but you are going to extreme lengths to make points that are inaccurate and do not fit what we are shown and told. I was going to extreme lengths to show that there is a much different story from the one you think these movies are telling. You are only pointing out things that fit your point of view rather than taking everything into account. Stop blaming the story telling that is perfectly in line with the previous 6 films (and a lot of it seems to original with GL himself) and just admit you don’t like things about it. You don’t need long detailed reasons. My reasons for hating certain Star Trek movies are very plain, simple, and I don’t try to rip apart every aspect of the films. I know what I don’t like and what ruins it for me. Abrams bad editing and poor science (it is Star Wars, but GL was always pretty good about making things seem reasonable while Abrams just pulled a Bruckheimer as far as I’m concerned) are why I dislike TFA. Though to me honest, it might also have something to do with seeing it in 3D and hating the 3D effect that made it look so fake. I’m waiting until IX to really delve into it in detail. But saying this is a reset and rehash of the OT fails to account for the goal of a finale in the form of IX. You see a reset, I see a setup. I see things moving toward an ending. Frankly the idea that they reset it makes no sense with IX being the saga finale. No sense at all.
What are you talking about? I’ve admitted I don’t like things about the movie ad nauseum, as many here will profess. There are differences in the story, but you don’t have to be a genius to notice the obvious visual and narrative simularities between the the OT and the ST. TFA has been widely criticized for this. TFA is a hommage to ANH. TLJ appears to follow suit, but uses several story twists to keep the audience on their toes. Someone else noted this yesterday, but the problem with this is, that once the novelty of the twists wear off, the narrative similarities between TLJ, and TESB/ROTJ become more obvious, leading to a continuous sense of déja vu while watching the movie just like for TFA, even if the outcome of events is different. A perfect example for this is the throne room sequence, which delibirately recycles the throne room sequence of ROTJ, with Rey having the same motivations as Luke, and even repeats some of the same dialogue, but then introduces a big twist to change the dynamic of the story. TFA left RJ with the difficult job of continuing a highly derivative story. He decided to use our expectations against us, and created a story that seems to rehash large chunks of TESB and ROTJ, but uses twists and turns to get us to a very different conclusion. Episode IX may be totally unique and different. I certainly hope so, but even if that turns out to be the case, we had to watch two highly self-referential, and derivative films to get there, and that’s a shame from a certain point of view. In my view it should not take two highly derivative movies to setup what might become a mostly original story for episode IX.
What I’m talking about is that so many who claim similarities are focusing solely on the similarities in your complaints and ignoring the differences. You can do the exact same thing with the PT. Exactly. The echoes in story telling were deliberate on Lucas’s part. It is the differences that are important. And in some of the similarities you point out, you have to really force it to make it sound the same.