Noxos

1. ESB/ROTJ
2. ANH
3. TPM
4. ROTS/AOTC
5. TFA

It’s difficult for me to compare TFA directly to the prequels, because I think it’s bad for different reasons, but honestly as much as I dislike the PT TFA is just on another level for me. I feel like it has way better production values and it doesn’t have the glaringly bad acting of the PT, but the whole thing feels so forced and artifical and I found the character interactions to be completely unbelievable and did not care what happened to any of them. I’ve hardly felt so little for characters in a film before. I got the distinct feeling that they were trying very hard to recreate the kind of banter that made ANH great but it just fell flat on its face IMO. The best summation of what I’m trying to get at here is put well in this excerpt from a quora post:

In real life people do not form instant trusting friendships, even when rescued. In Ep4 Luke spends most of the film thinking Han Solo is arrogant and selfish. Despite being saved by him several times, Leia also thinks that Solo is obnoxious, mainly because he is, but she also fancies him. She thinks that Luke is a nobody. R2D2 and C3PO have, at best, a love/hate relationship. These relationships between the characters aren’t wildly complicated, but they are varied, and realistic. Their interactions change as the films progress, and so do our attitudes towards them. It builds involvement.

The way relationships are portrayed In Ep7 is that if someone rescues someone else they are instantly BFFs. And everyone gets on just great. And completely trusts everyone else. All the time. The only relationship between protagonists with any kind of complexity is Han/Leia, which is a carry over from the previous films. This kind of weird emotional landscape is so alien, it destroys any chance of empathy that proper character detailing might have created. Are all of these space people on MDMA?

https://www.quora.com/Why-do-some-people-hate-The-Force-Awakens

The above killed the movie for me and put it beneath AOTC, because the camaraderie between the different characters I think is where most of the “magic” of Star Wars comes from . As bad as the writing and acting were in the PT, I did actually care about (some) of the characters and found their interactions somewhat realistic, despite the poor dialogue.

After being disappointing in TFA (I know I’m in the minority and I have no desire to ruin it for other people who loved it, but ya I didn’t 😦), I’m really kind of feeling the urge to check this series out, but only if it’s genuinely well written. Is it?

I’m posting this mainly to see if there is anyone else out there who feels the way I do about TFA, I haven’t read/watched any reviews yet but the 95% on RT kind of surprised me. I’m not trying to rain on the parade at all here – I really wanted to like this movie – but to me it was disappointing. I’m actually kind of jealous of those who really loved it.

Cons:

I did not buy any of the major relationships at all, to me this was by far the biggest failing of the movie. Finn/Rey, Finn/Poe, shockingly even Leia/Han. They all felt extremely forced and came across as trying REALLY hard to recapture the chemistry of the Big 3 in the OT. When Poe and Finn rush to embrace after Finn sees him for the first time alive, I was kind of taken aback because to me they just hadn’t “gotten there” yet, so it just came off as weird. I don’t know what the problem was, the acting, the script, or some elusive, hard-to-quantify, movie magic thing.

The whole movie felt like a point-for-point rehash of Star Wars/ANH – a few nods here and there are cool and would be expected, but TFA went way beyond that. I’m honestly pretty surprised that this script was OK-ed because it is so blatant in parts. Just a few examples:

-The fact that once again a critical bit of info is given to a droid who is left to his (its?) own devices – said droid is then taken hostage by desert scavengers before being “rescued” by the protagonist.
-All of the ball turret scenes on the Falcon.
-A “scoundrel” type character that makes snarky remarks and likes to use his ship’s undercarriage gun to blast baddies while trying to escape.
-Death Star 3 (I’m REALLY surprised they went with this as I thought it was a common problem that people have with ROTJ)
-Cantina scene

Due to the above (and more I didn’t mention) I frequently had the feeling that I was watching a straight up second rate remake.

Last major problem I had with the movie was that it was just not subtle AT ALL. The worst example being the scenes setting up Finn to leave the First Order. I could practically hear JJ yelling into my ear “HE’S CONFLICTED ABOUT WHAT IS GOING ON RIGHT NOW! LOOK AT HIS FACIAL EXPRESSIONS! – CAN YOU TELL HE IS CONFLICTED? IN CASE YOU COULDN’T – LET ME SPELL IT OUT FOR YOU – THIS CHARACTER IS VERY CONFLICTED!!!”

There were also a few really bad exposition scenes where it felt like characters were just vomiting up important plot points because the script couldn’t think of a more clever way to explain the story.

Ok so enough of the bad, there were some parts of this movie that I did really dig:

-Every scene with Snoke was great. What an awesome character design. When he first came up on screen I was just blown away – the hologram-making-him-seem-huge trick was a stroke of genius, though part of me wishes he really was that big.
-Lightsaber duels following more after the style that Luke and Vader have at the end of ROTJ (i.e. passionate hacking that looks like they are really trying to kill each other). The only problem was I couldn’t get emotionally wrapped up in them in the same way because again, I just did not buy the character relationships.
-Some very cool landscapes: my three favorites being the backdrop as Rey “sandboards” down a dune, the Snoke “throne room”, and the bridge where Han bites it.
-The vision sequences when Rey picks up Luke’s lightsaber were pure awesome.
So to conclude, for me this movie failed, though in a different way from the prequels. Say what you want about the prequels (I am not a fan at all either – not trying to stir the pot here – just want to give some context to my views), but George did not “play it safe” and rehash the OT at all. And as much as the prequels suffer from general “woodenness”, I found TFA’s character relationships even less convincing (excluding Anakin/Padme).

Still hopeful for VIII though, but now I’m probably looking forward to Rogue One more. And I did still have a good time at the movies — getting to see the OT on the big screen for the first time was a treat (I’m one of those people that shelled out for ~14 straight hours of Star Wars 😛)