What didn't you like about TFA? SPOILERS — Page 3

I have a slightly different explanation for the instant skillz thang. Some Force abilities are natural to people strong in the Force. Little Annie had fast reflexes and prophetic foresight, Leia seemed to be able to sense danger and could read telepathic messages from Luke. Kylo had more training than Luke got from Ben or Yoda. Touching the saber triggered in Rey a series of dream images which were about the object but also about herself. This may be enough for her to telepathically scan Ren to learn the mind trick and even absorb his sword fighting skills from him but not being such a hissy queen as Ren meant she could use his skills with more discipline. Luke enters the cave and comes out with a insight we prevents him from giving into Vader.We don’t learn anything in the original films or prequels that contradicts Rey gaining knowledge from a connection to an object. A cave is an object. As for being critical of a film based on premise details alone, I have still yet to see The Sixth Sense because someone explained the basic set up for me and I predicted much of the film and the twist. It just seemed so obvious to me that I didn’t want to watch a film so easily decodable.

SilverWook said:

My problem is you were ripping this movie before you even saw it.

With all due respect, and I’m not trying to be mean or rude, but how is it you can’t see this as completely irrational? I repeated multiple times that I was critiquing the story, not any other element of the movie.

To sit there and insist that you can’t critique the movie’s story without first seeing it is just like saying you can’t like a song’s lyrics unless you’ve heard it on the radio first. It’s irrational.

And even with your reasoning in place, how does that make me, a new member clearly interested in discussion – however heated it might be – at troll?

A troll is someone who’s intent is to simply be disruptive. Someone who expresses different and/or controversial opinions is the opposite of a troll – they’re the lifeblood of a discussion forum. They get people talking. They make discussions interesting.

Buy a ticket before you kvetch.

You do realize that’s exactly what the multi-billion dollar studio would want every sucker to do: “Disregard all critiques, don’t evaluate our product before you buy it, and just buy it, sucker! If you want to criticize it afterwards, go right ahead – we’ve already got your money, sucker!”

Come on, guys. Critical thinking is not a bad thing.

But you shouldn’t be surprised when other people around here disagree or defend a movie they happen to like.

And I’m not. Actually, that’s what I came here for – to discuss why I disliked the movie with people who liked the movie. I’ll tell you why I disliked it…you tell me why you liked it. Along the way, maybe you can tell me why or how some of the reasons I disliked the movie are wrong or unfair. And maybe I can do the same for you.

What I do not like is when a person purportedly a moderator of a forum dedicated largely to the Original Trilogy accuses me of being a troll for simply expressing a different opinion under the ruse of, “Well, you haven’t actually seen the movie, so you’re not allowed to speak.”

Really?

And then when the moderator launches ad hominem attacks against me:

Says the fellow who was harping on the movie before they finally saw it yesterday?

I guess I’m supposed to take from this statement that my viewing of the movie was “too fresh” or something, so, again, I’m not qualified to express an opinion?

Typical outlook of modern America: You are 100% free to express anything you like, so long as I agree with you.

John Doom said:

Usually soldiers are taught how to handle close quarter combats, and all that guy was asking for was a fair fight against the “traitor”.

Well, OK. Yes, I got that that was the “cool moment” Abrams was going for. But it was something absurdly corny that you’d see out of a cheap comic book.

Think of it this way: An American soldier is firing on an ISIS fighter. The ISIS fighter runs out of bullets. So the American throws down his rifle and calls the ISIS fighter out for a fist fight so that the fight can be “fair”?!

And the scene is even made sillier when you think of this: Why would a stormtrooper even be armed with a melee weapon that can CONVENIENTLY deflect lightsaber blades? Before you say, “So they can fight the Jedi!”, the Jedi are extinct (except for Luke). So they pose no threat. Why would your foot soldiers be armed with such an impractical weapon?

This is just yet another case of, “Let’s throw a lot of really ‘cool’ sh!t on the screen!” without any regard for whether or not the “cool” sh!t makes any sense.

Smoking Lizard said:

To sit there and insist that you can’t critique the movie’s story without first seeing it is just like saying you can’t like a song’s lyrics unless you’ve heard it on the radio first. It’s irrational.

I feel the same way. For example, I’ve read enough synopses to know that Man of Steel is an affront to everything I love about Superman; I don’t need to see the film to come to that conclusion.

Sure, the direction and acting have an impact on the final product, but poor writing is poor writing; the former may make the latter tolerable, but they don’t negate it.

Smoking Lizard,

I don’t have a problem with you not liking many aspects of the film. I have a few of the same gripes as well, but the problem with some of your posts is that after saying what you didn’t like, you really don’t explain ‘why’ you don’t like them.

Example: “Suddenly the new and improved First Order TIE fighters are two seaters.”

First, this is nonsense. It didn’t happen ‘suddenly’, it took 30 years of improvements. Is Ford still making the same 1985 F150 today? Of course not. Second, there may have been 2 seater TIEs in the OT that we never saw.

But back to the question…
WHY don’t you like 2-seater TIE fighters?
So you don’t like the quicksand explanation. Why? Is quicksand impossible?

Also, some of your gripes are either snarky or sarcastic to the point which makes me wonder if you even liked the film at all?

“But there’s other crashed junk all over the place that hasn’t been swallowed up by the desert.”
Perhaps there was a whole lot more before now and it was gradually swallowed up over many years?

“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.”

WHY is this a problem? BB-8 Knows this is his master’s jacket. He is a droid and has a perfect memory of every detail of the jacket. Rey mistakes Finn is a thief or some kind of bad guy and stops him. Why is this a problem?

“Oh no! The First Order is on to us! They’re chasing us!”
Again, WHY is this a problem for you? The First Order is trying to capture a droid and a traitor. They will be chasing them…what were they supposed to do?

I could do this all night, but you get my point. I’m cool if you have dislikes with the film, just explain why and you will likely get the lively discussion you want.

PD

One of the worst parts of the film was when the CGI prequel monsters got loose on Han’s freighter. That whole part of the film was not Star Wars. The tone was wrong. Anyone else feel the same?

The OT had some levity of course but it never crossed the line into silliness. I mean even Harrison seemed resigned to how stupid it was. And then the bad guys are getting eaten, and of course the hero is just being dragged around at high speed, banging against metal walls and floors, somehow not getting hurt, and then Rey pushes a button from across the ship and some door closes and cuts off the tentacles to free Finn.

I mean that’s just Kingdom of the Crystal Skull horeshit right there.

Maz’s character was stupid. She’s supposed to be a 1,000 year old sage, but when the FO shows up she’s surprised and just exclaims “those bastards, they’re here!” Meanwhile the janitor had already told her they were bound to show up, something every single person in the theater expected anyway.

As for Finn, his character was all over the map. I don’t blame this on Boyega, because it appears to me to have been a writing problem. Some producer in a script meeting must have decided that it would be a good idea to have a black stormtrooper in the film, because that’s pretty much all he was. If the plot needed him to be scared, he was scared. If it needed him to be brave, he was brave. If the plot needed him to be reckless, he was reckless. If it needed him to get beat up by a random stormtrooper, he was overmatched and beaten up by a random stormtrooper. If it needed him to hold his own against and injure an experienced force user … well, he did that too.

That’s basically all he was, just a black stormtrooper good guy because well, that’s unique isn’t it?

Jay said:

Alderaan said:

One of the worst parts of the film was when the CGI prequel monsters got loose on Han’s freighter. That whole part of the film was not Star Wars. The tone was wrong. Anyone else feel the same?

Yes.

Funny that you call them “prequel monsters” because that’s exactly what I was thinking during that scene. Just dumb.

As you know I was indifferent to the film but the creature design didn’t worry me. In the first film we had Luke attacked by rubber tentacles. Personally I find the dianoga far more problematic.

Overall, I didn’t like the movie for the exact reasons I’ve been posting in the previous months to its release.

It felt (and it was actually) like a movie whose script was talked about in “uncountable walkabouts”; and made by an aficionado director which holds in the highest regard to create something “cool” instead of something sensible.

I have complaints on many levels about this lievity of thought which lead to a certain post-modern flatness of the film.

I recognized all the elements on it that made the movie be StarWars. However it didn’t sound like it (generic adventure/harrypotter soundtrack). It didn’t look like it as well; on many aspects:

• The camera movements and angles weren’t much like the rest of the saga, PT included. (with its own transgressions, PT has at least some visual continuity with the cinematography of the originals)
• The illumination of the Imperial base bothered me. It felt a little like a cabaret. It is hard to tell this in a foreign language to me, but the impression was that it had nothing to do with the uniform fluorescent-white lighting the Death Star had. I deem this important since it implies actually a conception of the Empire as machine-like, flat and non human related (the main color was gray while in TFA, Empire’s color is black).
• The designs weren’t really eyecatching to me. As a designer myself I found them all kinda inconclussive. More like they took the stuff from the OT and they said “change just something and make it different”. Take the Star Destroyer, change the bridge and make it look like the pieces moved after they were glued. Take the Tie Fighter and change the colors. Take the Xwing and (my God, OT design was way more plausible) make it two engines.
• Some scenes were overly accented or overly iconic. From the top of my head, Han’s death, in a black enviroment (Xmen’s Cerebro like) with a ray of light falling over Han’s head… I can’t help picturing Abrams saying “epic cool epic man”.
  Next to it, Vader and ObiWan’s meeting in ANH happened in a random, fluorescent lighted corridor. And it was just as significant as this scene. Or it was meant to be. A good movie can represent hate between to of its characters by the script only without the needing of the enviroment to be a lava planet, or a poor reformulation of the bridge of Khazad Dum.
  I generally don’t like it when new outcomes of movies tend to eclipse significant moments or characters of previous installments of the same franchise. I was actually enthusiastic about the symbolism of TFA happening in the “middle ages” of the star wars saga. Because that would have put the public away from the basic premise of “this time it will be bigger, better, cooler”, and make something new on the contrary field. Like Kylo being basically a rookie in the force, a shadow of Luke which was as well a shadow of Anakin, but in the timeframe of TFA Kylo’s rough abilities suffice to keep everyone scared. But no, it didn’t happen. Anakin was supposed to be the greatest Jedi we’ve met in the saga, but somehow Kylo manages to make things with the force Anakin Skywalker could not do himself. The First Order makes a bigger Death Star. The death of the mentor is way more theatrical in TFA than in ANH even if ObiWan and Anakin are the real driving forces of the saga (at least to me, one good, one evil). It’s like the stakes are always higher.
  -Recycled planets with different names.
• Green Enviroments. This I can’t really justify nor do I hope to be understood, but somehow the Narnia Forests don’t feel enough exotic to me to be in a galaxy far far away. It happens to some degree in ROTJ, and definetely happens to me in TFA. It’s not just the fact that they’re forests but the type of forests as well. And Skellig Michael was just Skellig Michael; even more with that helicopter shot, which took me completely out of the movie.

On the plot side of things:

-I had trouble to actually care for the characters, much as in the beginning of TPM, only that this was the whole movie. I just didn’t feel comfortable at a Star Wars movie where Kenobi and Skywalker are third person names and R2 and 3PO are barely in it. Somehow it was as if the movie just happened outside the social sphere I have been invested in for the last six movies. Which is quite logic but somehow didn’t feel right to me. I expected this to feel like some fresh air but was quite wrong actually.

-I don’t have trouble generally with chance or fate as a given for Star Wars movies. It happens in the OT, in the PT and it will happen in the ST.

Things that bothere were how flat, thin, it all felt. Like it wasn’t way too thought. At points I felt like a massive juvenile mentality was behind the plot; like they done half the job well, which was detecting what actually worked in the OT, and half very bad, which was reformulating it into something (if not new) at least justified; this is understanding not only that it worked but WHY it worked, so that you can take the essence of that reason and apply it in a different way without having to be repetitive. Examples of this:

-Vader was a masked villain, with robot voice. Let’s have a masked villain with a voice modulator, because it’s cool. (In this case it is being omitted that Vader was so because he was badly damaged; his life support system and cyborg nature was inmediately linked to his affiliation with the dark side and ceasing to be a human being).

-The Empire built weapons of mass destruction. Let’s have the First Order build one too. (In this case it is being omitted how and where from, did the first order get the resources to build it. Not because the answer was important per se, but because the lack of answer to that questions leaves the weakness of the symbolism exposed: while the Empire was a metaphor of a totalitarian government, with the whole power of a State turned against its own people and that is why they can and would build a Death Star; the First Order is more like a political faction, funded by no one, who hasn’t clear goals. As I said in another thread, they’re basically neonazis building a nuclear weapon in a garage. Flat.)

At risk of being more extense, I leave without development similar points on yellow yoda, the resistance, etc.

Other thing that bothered me was the feeling that external reality poured into fictional reality. Ren is a fanboy of vader as much as any fan is. (how cool!) Han Solo is a famous character in the Star wars galaxy as much as he is in our reality (how cool!) Luke Skywalker is a pop culture mith as much as he is in our reality (how cool!)

I dreamed of these topics to be adressed with Anakin in the PT, but somehow this bothers me in TFA, when the same logic is used with other characters.

-The whole Hitler speech. I remember dreaming of a sequence like that decades ago, as a child; when I thought everything had to be explicit and that somehow symbols had an innate power. I immagined uncountable times that gigantic banner with the symbol of the Empire and a parade. Then I understood that evil doesn’t generally annunciate itself, and that symbols and speeches are an unnecesary underlining. A fetiche. I find the scene at the end of AOTC to be a thousand times more mature than this one.

This is the overall feeling I could sum up from the movie: it is a movie that showed everything I would’ve wanted to see back when I was ten. As if it was thought by someone that age who keeps thinking what’s “cool” and fun and not what is intelectually interesting, even within Star Wars borders. I deem this to be regrettable: the best installment of the saga was directed instead by someone who put A LOT of thought on every single line of dialogue and thing that happened in the film; just check the diaries of production for amusement. Kershner’s work in ESB was magistral.

TFA had all the elements of StarWars but it had a very different flavour to me. It’s not a search of its own but more of a movie that delivers what was expected of it; without too much freedom and without too much thinking. Even if it doesn’t right their own wrongs, it made me more appreciative of the prequels as well. (which doesn’t mean I enjoy them, but that next to TFA they somehow belong more to StarWars to me)

And I’m leaving outside stupid Disney stuff which could alter any mortal; like people realizing about stuff at the same time and saying it in chorus, someone taking time in the middle of a battle watch a pilot, etc.

CoughLando! It’s not racist to suggest an actor was specifically chosen to tick a demographic box. Star Wars has a well deserved reputation about it’s deployment of female and ethnically diverse characters. Even Mace Windu and Panaka were support characters. At least in this film a main cast member is an actor of colour and that should be applauded. It’s not controversy that Rey was always going to be female in a saga where the protagonist has been male six out the last six times. Both actors were cast on merit but both characters were written to type and when it’s not Jar-jar level insensitive there is nothing wrong with that in my view.