Alderaan

The Godfather and The Godfather Part II are a couple of my other favorite films. I also love the Wizard of Oz, The Sound of Music, Casablanca, and several Hitchcock masterpieces. I could go on and on. However, the Empire Strikes Back is still #1 for me. The script is a masterpiece, and the film is a visual and auditory extravaganza that maximizes the medium in a way most other top films cannot. The execution of the film is such a beautiful thing to behold.

Look at AFI’s all-time great lists. You will see Star Wars at #13. Empire is not on the list, because cineastes are pretentious and don’t like to get into sequels, but I’m sure most people who get into Star Wars will agree that Empire is an even better film.

imperialscum said:

Very enjoyable but kinda soulless.

I must admit that while PT being annoying, it has more soul.

I would say the opposite. TFA is mindless drivel, but it does have some spirit.

No, it’s the best film period. And I say that as someone who is usually into dramas, and not much of an action/adventure fan.

ZkinandBonez said:

I’m glad to see that my scale of “Citizen Kane - Ed Wood” has had an impact.

Also I agree that it’s important to judge a film by what it’s trying to accomplish.

The Empire Strikes Back is the best film ever made, period.

Smoking Lizard said:
Finn has made it perfectly clear that the First Order is looking specifically for BB-8 with a perfect description of what the droid looks like. Yet they make no effort whatsoever at hiding him? Heck, we know the First Order is looking specifically for BB-8 and have an exact description of him. Let’s take him into Maz Kanata’s really, really crowded bar, packed full of sketchy characters who might just be First Order informants!

Guys, it’s sloppy, slapdash, juvenile writing, as if the script was written by an 11-year-old.

Again, just a brutal takedown. Could have left the droid in the Falcon.

Well done.

Smoking Lizard said:
And let’s not even bother asking the obvious elephant-in-the-room question: Why did Finn even put the stupid jacket on to begin with…on the surface of an arid desert?! Sentimental reasons? Because he wanted to have something to remember Poe by? He was feeling sentimental about a guy he’d met 10 minutes earlier, so let’s put on his jacket and risk dying from heat stroke in an arid desert!

Get it? The reason why Finn put on the jacket wasn’t for a logical reason in the movie’s universe; he put it on because BB-8 needed some way to recognize him. That’s the very definition of contrived.

Brilliant. Haha

Yoda Is Your Father said:
But my point is Imperial stormtroopers, gunners, pilots and even officers have proven themselves to be a bit, shall we say ‘less than amazing at their jobs’ time and time again throughout the OT, so claiming that everybody in Ren’s unit would have been the ‘best of the best’ is a stretch.

Here’s how I see it. We can start with the stormtroopers in the OT. They are notoriously bad at aiming their blasters when they are shooting at our heroes. If it’s Jawas or disposable Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru, sure they are deadly. But if it’s Luke or Han or Chewie, OK their aim is not good and they can’t hit ****. Is that slightly silly? Sure, but it’s part of the Star Wars world and it’s a consistent tone throughout the OT. Unlike the battle droids in the prequels, at least they provide enough of a threat that our heroes still have to take care around them if they want to survive.

In TFA, however, Finn defies that consistency and the film moves from “slightly unrealistic” to “who cares it’s a movie” territory. Unlike the officer you cited at the beginning of Star Wars, or the stormtrooper who can’t aim, who are doing what you would expect them to (even if they are not doing it well enough) … Finn does something that is not expected of him. He does the opposite of what is expected of him. The reason is probably because someone decided in a script meeting that it would be a novel idea to have one of the Han/Leia/Luke characters be a stormtrooper, and everyone else said “oh yeah that’s brilliant let’s do it”. There doesn’t seem to be any effort to justify it in the rest of the script. It just happens and then the story moves on. Like I said, it feels like the story was written and directed by ten different people, and all their different pet ideas got into the movie, and everything was just pieced together with flim-flam one liners written back into the final draft.

Yoda Is Your Father said:
Besides, when we see Finn in action later in the film he is kinda badass - he knows how to hit a target (which is more than most stormtroopers), has no problem killing enemies when they pose an actual threat (i.e. they’re not unarmed villagers) and he’s pretty brave going up against Kylo Ren (when he’s just seen Rey get force-thrown against a tree and knows he’ll probably be beaten). He has clearly been well-trained. His desertion is, in my opinion, a moral choice, and a believable one at that. The First Order’s brain-washing of children can’t overcome the natural good in them… and isn’t that in line with the whole ‘light vs dark’ theme of the whole saga?

My problem with Finn is that he’s not a real character. He’s a plot device. In one scene he’s scared, and then without going through any kind of arc, he’ll randomly be brave and heroic in another scene just because the plot calls for it. One moment he might be reckless, and then another moment he’s calculating. When the plot calls for him to be selfish, he is selfish. And when the plot calls for him to be compassionate, he is compassionate. He wields a lightsaber and gets his butt kicked by a random stormtrooper, but then he wields a lightsaber and injures an experienced force user.

In short, Finn is just whatever the plot needs him to be at that moment. He’s a paper thin character, poorly thought out and unnecessarily inserted into the film.

TV’s Frink said:
No, it’s a terrible post, because Jay has been defending TPM. I don’t even know where that post came from.

Sorry I was talking about some of the other things in that post.

Yoda Is Your Father said:
What about that idiot who decided not to fire on the escape pod because it didn’t contain life signs? Were they trying to save ammo or something? In a world where artificially intelligent droids are commonplace… fire on the damn escape pod!

“There goes another one”.

The presumption was that they had fired on other escape pods and it wasn’t worth the hassle anymore. How many escape pods went off? Three? Fifty? We don’t know, but if there were a ton of them and none of them had lifeforms on board, it’s not a stretch to imagine the officers would tire of worrying about them.

RU.08 said:

Jay, I think you’re being unfair to TPM - I thought it was the best of the prequels. The CGI in the movie was better done as well when compared to TFA. For example, there are two prominent CGI characters in TPM - Jar Jar Binks and Watto. Jar Jar is a bit of a silly character only there to provide humour for the film, but Watto is more serious as a slave owner. In my opinion, Watto looks more photo-realistic than the CGI characters in TPM which as you say belong in a Harry Potter movie. When using CGI it’s best practise not to zoom it to fill the frame, but with Snoke JJ just puts it right in the frame to pull us out of the suspension of disbelief. Even movies that used practical effects used tactics to build the audience up for a reveal of an extreme special effect. For example, in Robocop Verhoven didn’t show the full suited Peter Weller at first - first they show his vision, then they show him from a distance but obscured. So that the audience would accept what they saw.

I showed Robocop to a friend of mine a few years ago, and he kept remarking about how he couldn’t believe that it’s a man in a suit. To quote him it didn’t look like it was possible to fit a man inside the Robosuit. And that’s a credit not just to the special effects team, the director, and the editor - but also to the actor who was able to create believable mechanical movement in nothing more than a rubber and fibreglass suit. One of the parts of TFA I liked was that jerky mechanical movement of the Millennium Falcon’s weapon chairs. That looked really good, it looked authentic. But as for Snoke he looked like he belonged in the Special Edition, or in Harry Potter.

Great post RU! I also liked the jerky gunner seat in TFA. Little details like that are so important in a film; it’s too bad there weren’t nearly enough of them.

mes1983 said:
Let’s put it this way: do you think Vader had “elite” troopers with him in ANH, when he is boarding the Tantive iv? They sure don’t look like it… And that could be considered as an equally important mission.

They all did as they were told and they all did what was expected of them. There wasn’t a stormtrooper on board who suddenly thought “naaaaah…I didn’t sign up for this!” and then helped Leia and the Droids escape.

Bingowings said:

I find it problematic because its rubber tentacles. It’s where I am yanked out of a galaxy far far away and forced to be in an Ed Wood movie for five minutes. I’m also surprised that the bit George fiddled with in the special editions was the totally fine eye stalk and not the terrible tentacles in all their horrid crappiness.

Fair enough. They never seemed to bother me though. I think they look more realistic than the CGI monsters.

The other stuff that I mentioned in those scenes is what stands out to me more.

Jay said:
Be careful with racial discussions, please. It’s really easy for that to veer off into a bad place. There’s no reason to assume Boyega was cast in the part other than they felt he was good for the role.

I wasn’t saying there was anything wrong with his character being in the film. My point was that there wasn’t any more substance to his character. He was flat, just a plot device and an idea on paper. He seemed unnecessarily placed in the film.

Lando on the other hand had such an interesting and fully fleshed out personality. I feel like if I met Lando Calrissian in a card room tomorrow night, I would know exactly how he would act and what he might say. His character is that tangible and familiar. His race was completely irrelevant, and the fact that they just happened to cast a black man who played the role terrifically is absolutely fine with me.

Jay said:
I would prefer this type of speculation be left out of the discussion, please.

You’re right, the conversation can go to a dangerous place pretty quickly. Perhaps I should have just kept it at “stormtrooper turned good guy” and left the racial component out of it.

My point was that his character was more of an idea than anything else.

Bingowings said:
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.

Why do you find the dianoga more problematic? The creature was hardly shown, as it was almost entirely underwater, which added to the mysteriousness of its threat. Luke got taken under in believable fashion, and the whole film stopped to concentrate on that dramatic moment. Dramatic pacing. The way Luke escaped was believable, the trash compactor started running, and the monster took off to escape. Finally, when Luke resurfaced, he was in obvious physical discomfort, having very nearly drowned. He was wet and he had dirt all over him. He was spitting water and grime out of his mouth. It was all very believable to me.

On the other hand, in TFA they went to great pains to show the entire rathtar on camera, which only invites more scrutiny to its physical appearance. The monsters weren’t there to put our heroes in danger … no, the rathtars were released to save our heroes dues-ex-machina style. The way Finn got away was not believable at all, it was just downright silly and eye-rolling. And when he got picked up, of course, he was being dragged around the ship at very high speeds. In the real world (and I would argue in the world of the OT), his body (and head) would have been slamming against the metal walls and floor and anything jutting out from them, causing serious bodily injury or death. But in the world of TFA, he was just fine. Not a blemish. Thanks Rey!

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?

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.

Count me in that group. TPM is absolutely a terrible film. But it does get excessively killed in reviews compared to the absolute crap that the next two prequels were.

The popular idea that Prequel #3 was actually a good movie is the most ridiculous Star Wars thing I’ve ever heard.

Yeah even after seeing TFA twice I would still go with:

Empire Strikes Back 10/10
Star Wars 9/10
Return of the Jedi 7.5/10
The Force Awakens 6/10
Prequel #1 3/10
Prequel #2 1/10
Prequel #3 1/10

hydrospanner said:
And where was it established that he is the First Order equivalent of the Green Beret?

Kylo was on the most important mission the FO could have possibly had. Did he take elite stormtroopers with him or some newbs that might happen to defect? Seems like another poorly thought out part of the story.

SilverWook said:
Snoke may have twisted the facts and made Vader into a noble martyr.

That’s great. Looks like we get another set of films where the main characters are idiots and always getting tricked by the bad guy.

SpilkaBilka said:
It just seems to come out of nowhere

That was a common theme in TFA

There was no “story”. The movie was just a bunch of ideas linked together with bad writing tropes. Jay gave one example a bit earlier.

hydrospanner said:
Well Darth Vader wasn’t quite as intimidating when he took his mask off either…

There are only two scenes in the OT when Vader took off his mask.

1. The Empire Strikes Back
   The scene shows that Vader is a real person, not all machine. The framing of the scene is brilliant, because it shows a divide between man and machine. And yet there is a man under there, inside that machine, and it’s all specifically designed to complement the climax of the film, when Vader reveals that he is Luke’s father.

Even then, only a very, very slight and momentary glimpse of the back of Vader’s head is revealed.

And even after that, he still kills a man in the same scene. The audience only gets to see his humanity one second, just so they can feel the climax more at the end of the film, then he goes right back to killing people. That is brilliant filmmaking.

And then even still after that, at the superficial characterization level, the audience can see that Vader’s head is scarred and deformed. There is an element of physical pain and dark side. Not someone who looks physically unharmed and like he just walked off the set of a shampoo commercial.

2. Return of the Jedi
   Luke takes Vader’s mask off right before he dies. But he’s no longer a villain at that point.

hydrospanner said:
I don’t see why it is such awful storytelling?

Because the hero should defeat the villain by virtue of their own abilities, not because they happened to catch the villain on a bad day or at a moment of weakness. The hero’s true strength and/or character can never be realized in that way.

hydrospanner said:
When did he say he didn’t want to be a bad guy anymore? He did say he was torn I believe. I am understanding it as the help he was seeking was for Han to let him kill him to get help rid the feeling of the call to the light he spoke of earlier.

I don’t know how I can state it more clear. It was pretty evident to me that Kylo was breaking down and having an identity crisis, just about sobbing to his father. Unless you are arguing that he was faking in order to kill Han, I think it’s objective fact that Kylo was caught in a moment of emotional weakness.

hydrospanner said:
I think this is nitpicking and you could ask the same questions of consistency of force use in the OT. Why didn’t Vader just force choke Luke from his fighter during the trench run?

Vader force choked one person in the original Star Wars, and imperial who was sitting next to him.

It’s quite a different thing in my opinion to wonder why he didn’t force choke someone he couldn’t even see on another spaceship. The ability to do that was never established (thankfully).

hydrospanner said:

hydrospanner said:
Why didn’t Vader just grab Luke with the force when he took the dive at Bespin and pull him back up just like when he just used the force to toss all those heavy metal objects at Luke a few minutes ago?

The only things that were moved with the force up to that point in the film were inanimate objects. In 30 years I have never considered why Vader didn’t suspend Luke’s fall in mid-air, for that reason. A force user throwing people through the air or stopping them in their place (as we saw in TFA) was never shown.

hydrospanner said:
Why didn’t the Emperor who sensed everything sense Vader about to turn and pick him up before he tossed him down the shaft and zap him before he was able to?

The Emperor didn’t sense everything. He didn’t sense Luke on Endor. He told Vader he didn’t sense Luke’s presence and asked Vader if his thoughts were clear on the matter. The Emperor was not infallible.

And let’s not forget, in the previous film, Yoda said the future was difficult to foresee, even for someone of his (and presumably The Emperor’s) power.

hydrospanner said:
Physically weak? I thought it is pretty clear that he was severely wounded from when Chewy shot him with the bowcaster, so sure he is definitely weakened from a physical standpoint.

I was speaking more about his physical appearance when he took off the mask. He was, shall we say … less than intimidating. But to your point about him being wounded…

First of all, even if he were wounded, that is terrible storytelling. Chewie shot him with a blaster and so our protagonist, Rey, only gets to defeat a weakened version of the villain? That is awful storytelling.

Second of all, I would contend that he was evidently not wounded enough to prevent him from running and spinning and jumping and twirling about with his lightsaber.
All of that is the worst of storytelling.

hydrospanner said:
Mental breakdown? He just killed his own father who apparently still loved him enough to caress his face after he rammed a lightsaber straight through his heart, so I am sure he actually did have a lot going on in his head.

Did you miss the part when he took off his mask and dropped it to the ground? The part when he told his father he didn’t want to be a bad guy anymore and asked for help?

I would say he was having an identity crisis.

hydrospanner said:
Force weak? Didn’t he use the force to slam Rey into a tree? Could someone who was weak in the force do that?

That was force strong and consistent with his character. When he suddenly stopped using the force and got his ass kicked later in the fight, that was force-weak. All of that buildup, showing him stopping blaster bolts in mid-air, freezing people in place, throwing them against trees … where was it when he was suddenly threatened?

hydrospanner said:
He also made it clear he wanted to take Rey under his wing and teach her so you could argue he wasn’t trying to murder her and he was caught off guard by her skills when she really started using the force.

This was all great up until a point. He should have been momentarily caught off guard and then the chasm should have separated them … saving Rey, not Kylo. It still would have been a dues-ex-machina ending, but at least better from a storytelling perspective than the one we were given.

That stromtrooper sabre scene was cringeworthy. Just brutal.

TV’s Frink said:
Did the sand swallowing the Tie Fighter bother you because you missed it being referenced earlier, or because the desert doesn’t conform to the way you expect deserts to behave?

This didn’t bother me. For one, I thought Poe Dameron booby-trapped the TIE fighter to disappear and hide their tracks. Maybe I was wrong about that, I don’t know, but it didn’t take me out of the story when I saw it. There were many other things that did, however.

TavorX said:

As someone whom really likes TFA, I think some of us are being too rude on those that didn’t like it.

Probably likewise.