That_OT_Ruler said:
A lot of his points though make very much serious.
Sure…
Smoking Lizard said:
Von Sydow’s character required someone to travel IN PERSON to Jakku to receive the map, rather than just transmit it encrypted to Leia.
Smoking Lizard said:
Instead of covertly sending an intelligence officer under deep cover to retrieve the map, Leia sends a pilot. In uniform. In an X-Wing.
Smoking Lizard said:
The blaster bolt suspended midflight and hanging in the air until Ren “coolly” released it.
Smoking Lizard said:
Kylo Ren and the First Order round up the innocent villagers and are setting the village on fire. When Kylo comes to question Poe, Poe deems it appropriate to crack jokes at Ren. No, Poe, don’t, you know, maybe BEG for mercy for the villagers and insist that they’re innocent. Nah. Crack jokes instead.
Smoking Lizard said:
OK, so we escape. Suddenly the new and improved First Order TIE fighters are two seaters
Smoking Lizard said:
The TIE fighter gets shot and then crash lands on Jakku. CONVENIENTLY close to Rey’s settlement.
Smoking Lizard said:
The TIE fighter CONVENIENTLY gets eaten up by the desert. Because, yeah, the desert eats stuff all the time…
…But there’s other crashed junk all over the place that hasn’t been swallowed up by the desert
Smoking Lizard said:
Finn runs to the settlement, where he conveniently bumps into Rey who conveniently has found BB-8
Smoking Lizard said:
So BB-8 tells Rey that that random dude is wearing my master’s jacket – or, well, a jacket that looks just like my master’s jacket. So Rey runs over and smashes him in the face with a blunt weapon
Smoking Lizard said:
Hey! Now we’re friends!
Smoking Lizard said:
How did you learn to fly the Millenium Falcon? I found a flight simulator! And the flight simulator taught me how to fly that type of craft!
Smoking Lizard said:
OK, we’re in space now! We ditched the First Order somehow…but oh no! We’re captured…by Han Solo…
…Who just so happened to be in the neighborhood, actively looking for the Millenium Falcon…at the age of 70 something years old. Sure he was a general once who led the Rebellion to maybe the greatest victory in the history of the galaxy, but now, at the age of 70, he’s back to being a smuggler
Smoking Lizard said:
Also gotta love that crawling across the table and switching the lenses in the goggles to amp up the magnification or whatever. Yeah, that wasn’t contrived
Smoking Lizard said:
Oh, hey! By the way, I’m Maz and I somehow have Luke Skywalker’s lighsaber in a wooden box downstairs in my dungeon! How did I get it, you ask? Oh, that’s a story for another time (TRANSLATION: The writers don’t know yet, either).
Smoking Lizard said:
Somehow Rey just stumbles on the box with the lightsaber. I know, I know – the Force. Uh huh
Smoking Lizard said:
So Rey is captured. She hasn’t figured out that she can already use the Force yet. Give it about 10 minutes and she’ll have it figured out.
Smoking Lizard said:
So Ren’s secret darkest fear is that he will never be as powerful as Darth Vader? Puh-lease.
I had to take a break after reading this one.
Smoking Lizard said:
Han and Leia repeatedly refer to Ren stiltedly as “our son” and not simply his name
Smoking Lizard said:
Leia’s stilted dialog: “It was Snoke who seduced our son to the Dark Side of the Force.” Ugh
Smoking Lizard said:
And the command center of the First Order doesn’t look very military
Smoking Lizard said:
Temper tantrums make someone a bad guy! Get bad news? Tear sht up with your stupid lightsaber! A key prisoner escaped? Tear sht up with your stupid lightsaber!
Smoking Lizard said:
Oh, hey, now we’re going to crash. No, not really. We’ll just skid along the snowy surface. And…wait for it…wait for it! Yep! Here comes a cliff! And wait for it…wait for it…errrt! We stopped just at the edge of the cliff! Never saw that before!
Smoking Lizard said:
We have X-Wing pilots who don’t look like military pilots. The female pilot especially…not because she’s female, but because she carries herself as a college student enjoying a theme park ride
Smoking Lizard said:
Rey kills Han. Thank God. Not because it was a good story element, but because at least it spares us from having to see an 80 year old Han Solo in the future
Another break ensued after reading this
Smoking Lizard said:
We have C3PO literally calling play-by-play during the battle!
Smoking Lizard said:
And even better! Somehow all the main characters somehow manage to escape the planet blowing up! Sure is a good thing the First Order was somehow able to pick up Ren from the surface and get him off the planet before the planet blew up! How wonderfully convenient!
Smoking Lizard said:
Oh, by the way, Ren got his butt kicked by Rey…who just suddenly, out of nowhere, learned how to use the Force and a lightsaber. How convenient!
I’m only labeling this as a nitpick because there are other factors that people seem to willfully neglect when discussing Kylo losing to Rey
Smoking Lizard said:
Oh! And why didn’t Rey just kill him?! Because a rift in the planet formed just at the right second! Phew! That was CLOSE! We almost lost our super “cool” villain!
Smoking Lizard said:
We land on a planet……and bring Luke his lightsaber.
That_OT_Ruler said:
The definition of nitpicking for one person might be very different from someone else’s.
I’m pretty sure what Smoking Lizard threw into that post can be called nitpicking by anyone. Things like Tie fighters having two seats doesn’t effect anything in the slightest so passing that stuff off as admissible problems just shows how little of an argument there is for TFA being bad.
That_OT_Ruler said:
as the movie left a lot of questions unanswered.
It did but the things that need to be explained will most likely be explained in the sequels or in novels/comic books (where they should be explained) and the rest of the stuff doesn’t warrant explanation.
That_OT_Ruler said:
I think we can all agree though, it is a straight-forward fact at this point, regardless of opinion, the story of the movie is most definitely a carbon copy of A New Hope.
If you’re boiling down the films to their barest essentials then they’re pretty similar but they’re totally different films if you don’t omit details.