Episode VII: The Force Awakens - Discussion * SPOILER THREAD * — Page 198

So I just had a thought about the role of Poe Dameron and the way the film is being marketed. The heavy focus on Rey and Finn made me think that maybe Poe isn’t as big a character as we were initially led to believe (I remember a lot of talk early on about him being included with the other two in a “new big three”). I just saw that Oscar Isaac has a print interview out this week and he finally got a character poster though, and I was reminded that in his Nerdist interview over the summer Isaac said he wasn’t going to be doing much press for TFA because he would be in the middle of shooting another movie by then. Do you think it’s possible that the marketing has been holding off on Poe simply because Oscar can’t be as visible as Daisy and John in the media push?

Highlights from press day: http://www.ew.com/article/2015/12/06/live-blog-star-wars-force-awakens-press-conference?1212

Quick hits -

-J.J. thinks that Maz and Yoda have met at some point
-J.J. explicitly states that there won’t be a post-credits scene
-Production on Episode VIII begins next month
-Rian Johnson has had/is having lengthy discussions with J.J. about continuity

The rest is mostly the cast sharing stories about production and stuff like that. No revelations, but very funny and charming. Worth a look.

You know it would be kinda fun to make an actual VHS copy of the movie, I guess I could do that when the movie came out, play from my computer to my tv which can be routed through to my ten year old VHS/DVD recorder, and then make a fake VHS box like the ones posted online. Would be a fun personal project if I had the time, maybe transfer it back to a DVD to post clips online. I always think it would be cool to experience modern movies on retro equipment.

Edit: Which, a bit off topic, reminds me of how my 30 inch 20+ year old Japanese Panasonic Tube TV I will argue still has a better quality picture than nearly most HDTV’s these days. The colors are perfectly tuned and the black levels so deep. Even running a Blu-ray player through it makes a noticeable difference due to compression/color improvements over DVD.

Hopefully a certain OT member will one day fulfill his destiny and release that pan & scanned VHS drive version of Revisited or he will have his double O license revoked 😄

Rey-centric ABC Family segment with some new footage: https://streamable.com/1bed
Check out the OT-era Rebel helmet just before the halfway mark.

Also, here’s a Spanish language Univision spot introduced by Oscar Isaac, again with a few new shots: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n72hz_hsuEI

ZkinandBonez said:

(I’m kind of wondering what shot(s) goes in between these two. It seems unlikely that these reaction shots are right next to each other.)

I think both shots are probably from after the Starkiller battle, though, because it’s the only time we’ve seen either character in a different costume. If we’re going by the MSW outline, my guess is this is right before Rey leaves to find Luke.

Evidently some of the staff involved in the Time cover story were shown the first 20 minutes of the film. I don’t have the whole article, but Star Wars News Net posted a few excerpts and it confirms a few things that we pretty much already knew (Finn and Poe stealing the TIE, Rey hanging out with BB-8, etc.) No word on the lightsaber in space thing, which is really the only thing I’m still dying to know about for sure before I see it for myself next week.

Also, Vulture asked George what he thought of the film face to face (Kathleen Kennedy said he “really liked it”, but I didn’t put a ton of stock in that). His response was so passive aggressive I can really only grin and shake my head.

“I think the fans are going to love it,” he said. “It’s very much the kind of movie they’ve been looking for.”

Somehow, this makes me feel better than KK’s quotation. Full article here: http://www.vulture.com/2015/12/george-lucas-delivers-a-verdict-on-force-awakens.html?mid=twitter_vulture

joefavs said:

Evidently some of the staff involved in the Time cover story were shown the first 20 minutes of the film. I don’t have the whole article, but Star Wars News Net posted a few excerpts and it confirms a few things that we pretty much already knew (Finn and Poe stealing the TIE, Rey hanging out with BB-8, etc.) No word on the lightsaber in space thing, which is really the only thing I’m still dying to know about for sure before I see it for myself next week.

Also, Vulture asked George what he thought of the film face to face (Kathleen Kennedy said he “really liked it”, but I didn’t put a ton of stock in that). His response was so passive aggressive I can really only grin and shake my head.

“I think the fans are going to love it,” he said. “It’s very much the kind of movie they’ve been looking for.”

Somehow, this makes me feel better than KK’s quotation. Full article here: http://www.vulture.com/2015/12/george-lucas-delivers-a-verdict-on-force-awakens.html?mid=twitter_vulture

Bahaha. Surely he followed up with, “I can’t believe I let those bastards finally get it.”

All I know is this … supposition for something like this is not my thing. Going to see the film when it releases in my hometown is all I will need to answer some of the burning questions I have.

Have fun with this discussion.

😃

towne32 said:

joefavs said:

Evidently some of the staff involved in the Time cover story were shown the first 20 minutes of the film. I don’t have the whole article, but Star Wars News Net posted a few excerpts and it confirms a few things that we pretty much already knew (Finn and Poe stealing the TIE, Rey hanging out with BB-8, etc.) No word on the lightsaber in space thing, which is really the only thing I’m still dying to know about for sure before I see it for myself next week.

Also, Vulture asked George what he thought of the film face to face (Kathleen Kennedy said he “really liked it”, but I didn’t put a ton of stock in that). His response was so passive aggressive I can really only grin and shake my head.

“I think the fans are going to love it,” he said. “It’s very much the kind of movie I should have made.”

FTFY George

Anchorhead said:

Did this ever make its way into here?
https://youtu.be/v7BwIyNN9rs?list=PL148kCvXk8pD4i6tww4roNV1R_oAceb-5

He looks great. I really hope we get to see him as a regular person in the flow of the film, not just as some sort of seated in a temple Obi-Wan duplicate with a few Wise Old Jedi lines.

Luke Skywalker, the cocky and passionate focus of the OT, deserves more.

Are you thinking something like the Luke character from The Star Wars?

Packaging for a new Rey action figure that seems to confirm that Finn carrying the Skywalker saber is misdirection:

I don’t think this rules out Finn being Force-sensitve or becoming a Jedi; I’d guess he’d probably need to have some aptitude to be able to make any use at all of a lightsaber. On the flip side of that, though, I’ve seen a lot of people elsewhere on the internet (who presumably haven’t been following this as closely as us) despairing about Finn wielding the saber because they’re convinced it means Rey won’t be a Jedi. It sounds like a ridiculous idea because everything that’s been revealed points to her being the main focus of the film, but it’s a thing people actually seem to be worried about.

joefavs said:

I don’t think this rules out Finn being Force-sensitve or becoming a Jedi; I’d guess he’d probably need to have some aptitude to be able to make any use at all of a lightsaber.

Last time I checked, it doesn’t take Force-sensitivity to swing a blade. People in the real world have been doing it for millennia.

The Plagueis truther community on Reddit is freaking the hell out over this image that showed up in a Mexican magazine purporting to be Snoke:

On the right is the Snoke image, the left is a result that comes up on the first page when you plug “Darth Plagueis” into google image search that it seems to be traced off of (the image they have of Kylo Ren is similarly traced off of a photo of a fan’s D23 costume). After all that stuff in the Andy Serkis and JJ interviews about how Snoke’s bone structure would be impossible to pull off without mocap, and how the look of the character continued to evolve into post-production, are we to believe they just lifted an existing (and rather lame) character design? It seems so obviously fake that it shouldn’t even warrant discussion, but then Collider Movie Talk claimed that they’d verified it with three different sources, and then shortly after that Disney contacted them requesting they edit the segment out of the episode. I honestly don’t even know that I’d hate it if Snoke was Plagueis in itself, because I know nothing about that character beyond his single mention in ROTS. I kind of assume he sucks because he’s from ROTS and ROTS sucks, but I have no concrete reason to be against this beyond a general desire to ignore the prequels coupled with a significant case of Sith-fatigue. In this last year of perusing TFA speculation stuff, though, I’ve found the Plagueis truthers themselves to be so insufferable that I think a major reason I’m upset about this is that I don’t want to see them validated. It’s not real, though. There’s no way.