I wanted to say something about the composition of the movie again. I don’t want to read to see if it has already been mentioned, so bear with me, all you soldiers who’ve stuck with the thread all this time.
I keep coming back to the impression that with a very few (if significant) exceptions, TFA was a great story with great characters and great settings-
-but-
-the editing was wrong all over. I don’t mean the fades and transitions, as in they were awkward or jumpy, but the assembly of all the scenes as a whole. It felt like the team had created a whole lot of great individual components/parts, but then put them together in a way wherein the whole wasn’t balanced right. I can’t break it down scene by scene and say where each should rightly have gone to balance out better, I just have a really strong impression of this. The film felt kind of lumpy. Like, almost right, but then you look closer and the building has a door on the 5th floor exiting into open air with no balcony. Or you realize that person you’ve been talking to for ten minutes has no left ear.
Dialogue, costumes, characters, scenery, architecture, everything was accurate and great - in both form and spirit - just put together without a sense of cohesion. An alternative (and more generous) criticism might be to say that it was edited with a sense of composition that was abstract and unconventional, but even that wouldn’t serve, the scene ordering/structure just deviates from the wavelength of the OT. I think this is the real and only significant flaw in this entry in the series.
Does this assessment make sense for anyone else out there? I’m really struggling to articulate something that is elusive and subtle to me.
I definitely understand what you’re trying to say. In particular, I felt like the planets weren’t shown in a way that suspends your disbelief and makes you care about them.