Smoking Lizard said:
I really don’t want to sound argumentative or terribly cynical, and I understand that so many fans really want to like this movie, but seriously, I have to say, at this point, knowing what we know how can anyone suggest this movie is good?
I wonder at times if everyone in society has collectively lost his mind.
This movie is clearly a cheap ripoff. A con. A money grab. A bait and switch.
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The Empire was defeated in the original trilogy. No problem! We have a new, improved empire! Complete with an evil guy in black robes, scary mask, and red light saber!
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How did the Republic allow the Empire 2.0 to come into existence? Who cares! It’s a movie! Please don’t answer, “How did the original empire come into existence?” Because the answer is simple – a corrupt politician seized the existing legal republican government, a la Adolf Hitler, that’s how. So did the new Republic make the same mistake? No, because the new Republic still exists in this new universe. So WTF? Oh well…who needs things to make sense?
Who says they won the entire war in ROTJ? They celebrated one military victory in a tree-house-village with a bunch of natives. ANH also had a huge celebration at the end (it was considerably bigger I might add), yet that didn’t mean that they won the war.
Even the EU never assumed that the war was won. Just because the Emperor died doesn’t mean you win the entire war.
Smoking Lizard said:
- So the Empire 2.0 has stormtroopers, but they’re not clones…and they’re not conscripts or recruits. So the Empire 2.0 breeds them? From birth? So the Empire 2.0 has some vast wing of babies being birthed to become stormtroopers somewhere? How else do you explain that “Finn” does not have a name?
Well, to be nitpicky, Finn did say that he was taken away from his family at a very young age, so he wasn’t technically bred to be a Stormtrooper.
Smoking Lizard said:
- Why is it that in a galaxy populated by trillions of people, we keep bumping into the same four or five over and over, no matter where we go? And the same goes for spaceships, too. How awfully convenient that the Millenium Falcon just happens to be on the desert planet that Rey is on? And how awfully convenient that Han Solo decides it’s a good idea to take back ownership of the Falcon at the age of, what, 70?
Again, to be nitpicky, if none of this, or anything similar had happened, we wouldn’t have had a movie. What you described is basically just Hollywood 101. Also, the OT was filled with moments like these. I mean what are the chances that R2 would end up with Luke in ANH. Out of the entire planet, he happened to land nearby, and conveniently get captured by Jawas that would end up re-uniting him with C3PO, that would then sell him to the force-sensitive son of the main villain, that was also tied in with the guy he was looking for in the first place. And what were the chances that that R5 droid would malfunction at just the right moment, thereby making the rest of the film, as well as the rest of the trilogy possible.
Also, the main villain was all of a sudden the main characters father, and once that was established they turned the love interest, now that she’d gotten ‘hitched’ to the other male protagonist, into conveniently being his long lost sister.
Star Wars, like most movies, are all about convenient plot twists. This is hardly anything new.
Smoking Lizard said:
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So the Empire 2.0 has an even bigger, badder Death Star. It blows up stars! But it’s on a planet…so it cannot travel from place to place in the galaxy…so it shoots its laser or plasma or whatever blasts from light years away and the blast travels and travels and travels across the galaxy to hit its target? What does the laser blast make the jump to hyperspace itself to get to its target in due time?
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I mean, really? The Death Star thing all over again? Really? And somehow the First Order/Empire 2.0 is capable of making a weapon even more powerful that the Death Stars, despite the fact that it’s not the ruling government of the entire galaxy?!
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And really, like, say, 10 or 20 years before this movie is set there was NO ONE in the Republic saying, “Hey, guys! A bunch of copycats are restarting the Empire! They’re building star destroyers and TIE fighters and maybe a planet killing machine thing! We need to stop them!”?!
Although, I think most people more-or-less of agrees with you here (me included), it has after all been 30 years, and the second Death Star took less than two years to build. So if you can make a super weapon the size of a friggin’ moon in roughly two years, image what a bunch of fanatics can manage in three decades. Also, the film never established how powerful the First Order really is so we don’t know if they’re actually a remnant similarly to the EU, or still a large political Empire. For all we know the galaxy could be divided between these two large military forces. Until, we’ve seen ep. VIII and IX, we can’t really tell.
Smoking Lizard said:
- And really, Rey thinks the Jedi and all that jazz is “legend.” Um, hello? That war was only 30 years ago! That would be like saying the events of 1985 are just perceived as “legends” today in 2015. Please. Yeah, WWII was just a legend. Right.
Technically it’s been half a century. Keep in mind that the Jedi haven’t really been a thing since the start of the Empire (19 BBY, e.g. prior to ANH). Also, it’s a big galaxy, and Rey is on a scavenger planet in the middle of nowhere. So 50 years earlier there were roughly thousand magical peacekeepers that mostly worked undercover and were only directly involved in politics and military campaigns. Even in the PT the Jedi were treated as somewhat mythological. Anakin didn’t question their existence, but he exaggerated their abilities when talking to Qui-Gon. By the time of ANH, no one really doubted that there was once lightsaber wielding religious warriors, but the Force had become a somewhat forgotten notion. Add another 30 years to that, and it’s really not that strange that someone would believe they were legends, or at least apocryphal. Rey also clearly knows all the names, events, and even certain details, she just perceived them as folk tales and exaggerations.
Smoking Lizard said:
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SURPRISE! The bad guy is Han and Leia’s son! Wow! Never saw that coming! What a huge reveal!
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Luke Skywalker’s Jedi Academy is wiped out, SO HE LEAVES?!? GOES INTO HIDING?! When there’s a perfectly safe Resistance planet he could have gone to to help out in the fight?! Don’t tell me Obi Wan went into hiding, because he didn’t. He took Luke to safety on Tatooine and then guarded over him because he knew that the only person who could possibly sway Darth Vader back to the light was Vader’s son.
His father turned to evil, he himself almost turned to the dark side, and during his first attempt at living up to the Jedi before him one of his students turned to evil and slaughter everyone. Although, I would’t consider going into hiding the best idea, it’s not necessarily inconsistent with his personality, or any human-being for that matter. I mean he’s got quite a large amount of heavy burdens to live with, and a lot of responsibility for a ex-farmer, turned war-hero, and wannabe-Jedi.
Smoking Lizard said:
- Leia gets word that there’s a lead as to where her brother is…so she sends her best PILOT to collect the intel? Yeah, because when there’s important information to be collected in Iraq or Syria or Russia, President Obama sends his best F-16 pilot.
Again, that just movie-logic. I don’t think real-life politics is the best thing to draw inspiration from. Also, how about ANH, they’ve discovered and stolen the plans to a new super-weapon, and Bail Organa sends his teenage daughter to deliver them. Also, they decided to have Lando, some ex con-man they’ve only know for a few months, to lead the attack on the second Death Star. Surely someone more reliable like Wedge would make more sense?
Smoking Lizard said:
- Han Solo: “Hey, Finn, I hear you have some really important information to get to Leia. I mean, we could just, you know, do one of those video chats that we do all the time, but, nah. We’ll go there in person. In the Millenium Falcon. BUT FIRST! We have to make a pitstop at a bar in a castle so you can meet my old Force sensitive mentor!” Finn: “But Han! In the first movie released in 1977, you told Obi Wan that you didn’t believe in the Force! That you had traveled from one end of the galaxy to the other and just concluded it was just ‘simple tricks and nonsense.’” Han: “Um…oh yeah.”
So Han knew this weird old lady that babbled on about magic all the time. Sure, that’ll convince him it’s real.
She may have know about it, but she wasn’t force sensitive. Then why does she talk about it so much? Well she’s a thousand years old, meaning that unlike everyone else she’s only been in a Jedi-free galaxy for a fraction of her life-time. And in a millennium you’d probably bump into a lot of interesting people. Some of them had to have been Jedi. Also, Han bragging about having been all over the galaxy, was the cocky bragging of a cynical, thirty-something smuggler.
Anyhow, I don’t blame you for being disappointed by this film. It rehashed a ridiculous amount of things, and it’s far from perfect. But I think you’re exaggerating by calling for a “public outrage.” It was a casual pop-culture sequel that added something new, and rehashed a lot of the old. And I think it’s far to early to make assumptions about a good deal of the films new/continued lore.
