cyclista

I think Maz’s place is a red herring as far as the similarities go. The accusations are reasonable, but if you think about it both the existence of such a place and Han+Chewie’s haunting of it makes too much sense universe and character-wise to write off as a Mos Eisley cantina stand-in.

Starkiller base is indeed more of a stretch to justify, but why wouldn’t galactic smugglers frequent seedy space bars? Really there should be dozens of such places (at least). How many can you count in LA or NYC? Are they all ripping one another off? Was there some primordial progenitor bar that every subsequent one is derivative of?

I don’t think any of the 7 films has a single depiction of or allusion to a bathroom or toilet of any kind. Guys, this is weird.

I half think that they should just finally and casually add them in without fanfare, just to complete things, but then also half think they should make it really weird, some other imaginative alternate reality waste management system.

But it would be really funny if they did something like the skin thing. Like all this time we just assumed people like Finn and Luke and Rey were humans, but in episode VIII it is revealed they actually have their genitals in their armpits or something.

Also, an even broader question is multi-species toilets. Sometimes there are probably a dozen or more species in one place, like at Maz’s house or at the Mos Eisley cantina. What would THOSE bathrooms look like?!

Hal 9000 said:

I’d remove the joke about Finn not understanding Han’s nod to look behind him. That’s one thing I felt was a little too dumb.

I think they just made it last too long. I got the joke the millisecond they started it, and thought it was well done. But then, inexplicably, it seemed to drag on interminably. Like, how many head nods do you guys need here to complete this scene? It isn’t a gag that needs an extended pantomime sequence to play out, they could have done it in the time it took Boyega to speak his line. It’s funny how a few milliseconds can be the difference between nailing the joke and trashing it.

Or rather… NOT funny, if you know what I mean.

badump bump

The first time I saw Star Wars, one of the many things I came away from it with was “where were the bathrooms”? This is akin to various “food in the OT” comments, but, you know, the opposite.

Seriously, where are the bathrooms.

O_O ?

^ ewww

More things I liked about TFA:

-Lightsaber/snow interaction
-Chewbacca doing something that actually had a pivotal effect on the plot, which is a series first (shooting Kylo Ren in the stomach)
-Real creature effects, as opposed to CG (I think that giant boar/rhino creature drinking out of the trough with Finn was puppetry not CG) (look at its weird butt) (no, really look at its butt LOOK AT IT)
-New stormtrooper classes, stormtroopers aren’t exclusively disposable henchmen anymore
-Onscreen representation of espionage networks
-Depiction of force sensitives that are non-jedi/sith
-New x-wings are super cool

luckydube56 said:

And besides kids in the Star Wars galaxy suck.

so, so sadly qft

but maybe that can change now

although idk young Padme was pretty cool as a person

Darth Muffy avatar=appropriate to request

this comment will not make sense in future

Doom: yeah things get heated. It’s annoying but predictable. Just sidestep it or start new/other threads. Also, you don’t have to leave! Just don’t stray from the topic to far/long.

TV’s Frink said:

I don’t see any reason you have to only talk about things you love in this thread. That’s as silly as only talking about things you hate in the other thread.

What you shouldn’t do is come in and randomly drop something in one thread that belongs in the other. However, I don’t see anything wrong with responding to something someone loves with a rebuttal…especially if the original comment doesn’t make sense.

Yep.

eiyosus said:

THE FALCON’S TARGETING COMPUTER!!!

SO impressed with that. Not to be extreme, but it blew me away - it was one of the moments where I realized what they were doing with this movie. Integrity.

Anchorhead said:

Jesus, is there any topic you guys can’t devolve into an argument about further discussing the thought of accepting weather or not to weigh the pros and cons of debating opinions?

lol

John Doom said:

P.S.: So much better using old-school links instead of quotes, to avoid building a wall of text 😄

I tend to prefer cut-and-paste (used in this post), though this can be tricky as you don’t want to misrepresent what was said. But I figure if someone needs to see the full context they can just page back.

Hey now, this isn’t the debate whether it was good or not thread. I’m grateful Doom showed up to this party at all! Thanks Doom.

ITT: LOVE ONLY

oojason said:

Lord Haseo said:

I also loved how in that brief scene they established Poe and Finn being friends far better than us being told Anakin and Obi-Wan were friends in the Prequels.

Great point mate. One of the bugbears of the 3 previous films is that important friendship between Obi-Wan and Anakin was not satisfactorily seen or felt - yet it happens quite casually and seemingly naturally in TFA with Poe & Finn.

This might be something ultra-important about the Disney contribution. Disney teams are probably all highly skilled in emotion portrayal. Lucas was, frankly, awful at that. IMHO structuring believable, resonant emotional connections between characters in the PT is the second most urgent task for any faneditor to tackle, the primary/foundational trifecta of course being the removal of Jar-Jar, midichlorians, and racist stereotypes. The emotional connections are the more subtle and difficult of the two to handle.

GROOOSSSSSSSS

ANYWAY

apologies for contributing to off topic 😛

oojason said:

In terms of the Sagas itself I liked the return of real sets - acting and reacting in a real environment or sets (or as close as).

yet it wasn’t that the CGi was bad, it was that they were CGI characters in a ‘real’ film.

to be honest Maz has grown on me

Real sets - great point. I think most people have taken that drastic upgrade for granted. The point about the juxtaposition of real and CG also resonates with me. I don’t know how they could have blended it better, but that would be a reasonable explanation for why so many have objected to both Maz and Snoke.

And I love Maz. She’s got a little of the stereotypical “wise old person” thing, which decreases her depth a little, but I think she looks cool and her facial expressions are fascinating, and her voice is really good. I definitely want her to still exist somewhere in that universe. Also, for a lady thousands of years old she’s kind of cute. I love her line about her boyfriend, followed by “I like that wookiee”. In the theater I was like “what”. A good introduction, audacious, cute, and immediately there is a history there. It will be funny if we ever get to see her and Chewbacca interact, I’m not sure what the best way to play that out would be though. The obvious thing would be to have her chase him around, but that would be kind of cartoonish (lame).

Maybe if she was just doing something to make him uncomfortable, so we get to see Chewbacca socially uncomfortable. Like maybe he’s sitting down and she’s bugging him and he just suddenly gets up and leaves the frame and that’s the end of the scene. Or all this could happen in the background of another scene.

A lot of comments about Hamil’s contribution - yes. That look on his face was all the presence he had in this film, and it was exactly as intense as we needed. That is the face of an immensely powerful man who is almost broken inside.

SilverWook said:

Return of The Jedi was filmed in the 80’s.

I know, but its odd if you were making fun of it because some guy had a 70s haircut during the 80s, it didn’t seem like that was your criticism. I was just saying: this was an actual haircut thousands of humans had on our earth. A shitty, gross haircut. It wasn’t pleasant. I’m sure a few old TV episodes on youtube can provide glorious examples of this.

ITS NOT THE HAIR

ITS THE BEARD SHAPED OBJECT ON HIS FACE

Sorry, I don’t mean to be contentious. Okay it’s both.

FACE RUG

ScruffyNerfHerder said:

I’m very skeptical. I fear that whoever they get to play Han Solo will make no attempt to capture Harrison Ford’s mannerism, et. al. In fact, that’s why I wasn’t thrilled with Chris Pine’s James T. Kirk. Pine made his own character and that’s fine, but to me it just wasn’t Captain Kirk.

Usually I’d disagree with this kind of thinking, but Harrison’s facial expressions were a distinct part of the character, the way he uses his eyebrows for instance is fundamental to the humor of the character, the incredulity he often expresses and his charm. The way his eyes get kind of squinty when he smiles. Anyone without these qualities will just be mediocre Han Solo cosplay, no one wants a whole movie of that.

Basically I think it matters less whether the actor’s resting face is close to Harrison’s, and more whether the actor’s expressions work the same as Harrison’s. He’s got that smile that immediately wins you over, it’s just something Harrison has as a natural part of his face magic. You can’t tell even a quality actor to “smile rogueishly”, and there you then have Han Solo. Sorry casting department.

Anthony Ingruber does do the expressions right for the most part, but I don’t know if he could fully carry the character as I’m not familiar with all of his work.

SilverWook said:

Me too. She and Ackbar had a torrid love affair in the early days of the Rebellion.

And we also need a movie to explain what the heck is up with General Madine’s Gumby hair.

Dude, so many people had haircuts like that in the 70’s. What gets me every time with that character is the astroturf beard. They just glued that thing on his face half an hour before his scene. Somebody cut it out of a sheet of felt from the craft store down the street because they ran out of fake hair.

And that shortlist is extremely discouraging, based on resting faces of course. Scott Eastwood looked like he might have a tiny amount of the right face magic. Some of the others were laughable.

Also, I said might. If the editor INSISTED on being LAZY.

Actually ok I just added that qualification now. But yeah, probably no one wants a lazy editor all up in their Star Wars, so.

Also how am I going to ask your baby questions. Does your baby actually answer questions? Will we talk on the phone?

Congratulations on your super cool/advanced baby.

HA

WHAT

Do animal noises create a requirement for membership in the Screen Actor’s Guild?

If not they could have saved some money that way.

LuckyGungan2001 said:

I also really like the scene where Rey is washing dishes, and looks over to the elderly women also watching dishes. I like this scene because you see the sort of realisation in Rey’s eyes that she may well be doing this until she is that age.

Thanks! These are the kinds of details I wanted. Yes! So many subtle things like this were expertly done. Timing, dialogue.

I feel like there ended up being a dynamic where production details like character development and individual scenes were treated with the utmost care, while in other places effort was somehow squandered in the editing. It’s weird.

Another thing I remembered I loved (I’ll keep adding things incrementally) was the purring sound BB8 occasionally makes.

Agreed.

I also thought the Hensonitis that the movie contracted was lame. I cringe every time I see Jabba’s rubbery pig guards.

And I adore Jim Henson’s life work. Just not here. Jedi began the descent into the childish bullshit in the prequels.

Luke in black was awesome though. And his green lightsaber was so cool the first time I saw it!

I also think the ewoks could have been done better, in other words that they didn’t completely fail as characters. This is why I have hope for future edits.

Oh, also:

http://originaltrilogy.com/topic/In-what-ways-did-TFA-completely-nail-it-either-in-terms-of-filmmaking-or-in-terms-of-continuity-SPOILERS/id/47541

MUAHAHAHAHAHAhAAAAAA

AAA

Here continuity can mean attention to universe details, or it can mean aesthetic, or feel, or any combination of these.

Filmmaking can potentially here mean just great scenes, irrespective of their presence or lack of Star Wars flavor. Mmm, Star Wars flavor. We can also talk about acting.

I’ll likely never have the energy for a comprehensive list of plaudits, but I’ll throw out a random few generalizations.

I felt the textures were spot on, not only the weathering of all the physical objects but the “film” itself. Reminiscent but utilizing the advantages of new camera and processing technology.

I haven’t memorized the actor’s names yet, but Finn, Rey, Poe, pretty much the whole cast except Leia (sorry Carrie, you’ll be more in the flow for the next installment, I have no doubt) were fantastic. Committed, earnest performances all around, Leia included.

Vehicle physics were great. Tech was great. The ragged blade of Kylo Ren was such a great touchstone, way more effective than the cross hilt.

Max Von Sydow’s death at the beginning was a device/trick, but a really good one, got us invested immediately. His mystery was welcome. Every story needs unopened boxes, especially serial ones.

BB8 - I fucking love BB8, especially after multiple viewings, and what is way cooler than just BB8 in the movie is that the technology exists in our world to do the mechanical part. There are two remote controlled versions. Way more versatile design than R2 (sorry R2).

Making the relationships between the characters unclear for most of the film was also a good device. Leaving Luke out of most of it was smart as well. The twirling aerial shot at the end felt a bit wrong somehow, but ending with a silent shot of Luke was brilliant. Luke having a beard was also brilliant. I love that he looks kind of like Ben (Obi Wan).

Ok tired of typing now, more later hopefully, but please add your own observations.

hydrospanner said:

cyclista said:

Maybe I didn’t explain my criticism well enough, but it wasn’t just about passage of time, in fact it primarily was not. It was about the complexity of the base. If you were in downtown Manhattan in a skyscraper, and you saw some person you needed to get to in a skyscraper across the street, even if the two buildings were owned by the same company and had tunnels or bridges connecting them, it is guaranteed that crossing the gap and finding that person would be very difficult, especially if there was any kind of security and you looked like you didn’t belong there.

Sure, the time factors in, it would take forever just to find the room you’d seen them in. But if they were moving about, that would leave it to chance that you’d find them or not, calculated by square footage and rate of movement, to be technical. So we can figure that they were in fact lost, but maybe by chance, the Force helping perhaps, they ran into one another. But then we’re back in the realm people here keep getting into where you come up with your own personal explanation for something the screen in no way shows or implies, and we should not be doing the filmmaker’s work for them.

It isn’t nitpicking. It’s frankly absurd. You may not have picked up on it, but I literally laughed out loud in the theater involuntarily when this scene happened. And I’m not a hater of this movie either, I mostly loved it.

Wouldn’t all of this apply to a lot of the scenes inside the Death Star too?

I’d have to go back and scan episode IV, but I think while they were inside that death star they did a lot of looking and pointing at screens with floor plans on them, and also had R2 giving them directions.

It wouldn’t have taken much, just a wipe might have been enough to fix it. They did that earlier when the Falcon started fucking up in the middle of Rey and Finn having a moment. Finn was like WHATS HAPPENING and Rey jumped down in a hole aaaannnnnd wipe. It was funny but fine.

Maybe I didn’t explain my criticism well enough, but it wasn’t just about passage of time, in fact it primarily was not. It was about the complexity of the base. If you were in downtown Manhattan in a skyscraper, and you saw some person you needed to get to in a skyscraper across the street, even if the two buildings were owned by the same company and had tunnels or bridges connecting them, it is guaranteed that crossing the gap and finding that person would be very difficult, especially if there was any kind of security and you looked like you didn’t belong there.

Sure, the time factors in, it would take forever just to find the room you’d seen them in. But if they were moving about, that would leave it to chance that you’d find them or not, calculated by square footage and rate of movement, to be technical. So we can figure that they were in fact lost, but maybe by chance, the Force helping perhaps, they ran into one another. But then we’re back in the realm people here keep getting into where you come up with your own personal explanation for something the screen in no way shows or implies, and we should not be doing the filmmaker’s work for them.

It isn’t nitpicking. It’s frankly absurd. You may not have picked up on it, but I literally laughed out loud in the theater involuntarily when this scene happened. And I’m not a hater of this movie either, I mostly loved it.

DuracellEnergizer said:

You pictured Anakin as a young Alec Guinness? ;-P

This is kind of what I pictured. I figured Anakin was kind of a more powerful and slightly more reckless Obi-Wan, and someone who was smarter than Obi-Wan as well; the kind of person tempted to consider their own judgement superior to others because in fact in many cases it would have been (as opposed to Hayden’s portrayal, in which he is almost comically wrong-headed about everything, and isn’t very smart - to the point that Palpatine remote controls him from the moment they meet). The kind of person tempted toward failure of character through hubris. But also someone good-natured enough that they could have spent a lifetime in friendship with someone who was, in the final analysis, their moral superior (Ben).

The Merchant said:

I found a good fanart of what appears to be a young Sebastian Shaw playing as Anakin Skywalker:

^ This isn’t too bad, though the uniform wouldn’t be something I’d have imagined. Looks interesting though. This guy definitely looks like someone who could have shared adventures with Alec Guiness, almost a Lamont Cranston type.

Jude law with lighter hair might have been passable facial-structure-wise, but he has a kind of Fred Astaire body language that I think would have been wrong.

SpilkaBilka said:

I always thought (a bulked-up) Russell Crowe would’ve made a good Anakin.

Yeah, this might work, if Crowe could put a little less Gladiator and bit more Guiness in the performance. He probably would have found that difficult, though, his testosterone levels are off the charts. I’m not sure any kind of deft, classic British cinematic aplomb is in his range. I’m also not sure I could see him and Guiness ever hanging out irl. Him and MacGregor, maybe.

Voss Caltrez said:

One more thing, I never liked the reveal of Vader under the mask in ROTJ. I assumed his voice was affected somewhat by his respiratory machine but even so, a British accent would not disappear. I also thought his face was going to be way more scarred up as hinted in ESB, but here he’s just a pale bald older Brit, with or without eyebrows.

This.

joefavs said:

This reminds me of something I was wondering about a couple weeks ago: I remember knowing that Obi-Wan and Anakin fought their duel on a lava planet well before The Phantom Menace came out. Even before the PT, that was just an accepted fact among everyone I knew. My question is, where did that come from? Was there an interview with Lucas or an EU novel or a comic book that had that in there? EVERYONE took it as gospel, but I haven’t a clue where anyone got the idea.

I always heard it was in the original novelization.

ZkinandBonez said:

[Ryan McAvoy said:]

A younger Jake Lloyd, surely?

How about the older Jake Lloyd?

Holy Shit that freaked me out. Let’s stop destroying kids lives through childhood fame from acting roles, huh? Seriously, upsetting.

Bingowings said:

Arguably the pre-ROTJ Force was such a merit based power. The reason we don’t have Jedi is we don’t have Jedi masters to school us in the Force. Even a farm boy on a planet in the middle of nowhere can become a Jedi.

In ROTJ the power of inheritance is introduced and Luke’s sister is a Princess but she is an adopted Princess so she might be still ‘low born’.

In the PT Luke and Leia are the offspring of royalty and a demi-God.We have gone from the age of Aquarius back to the age of Dragons. Luke is no longer Uri Geller with Kung-Fu moves, now he’s a royal prince with magic blood.

This is a brilliant observation. I always thought of the Jedi as a monastic order of warrior sages, not as a society of supernaturally gifted mutants. I hated the way the prequels suggested that Jedis sought out “their own” to train them. Of course there would be some in this order who excelled more than others, and who would play greater roles in history.

The inherited gift thing sucks; it makes the extinction of the Jedi much easier to accomplish and far less heinous as an act; the extermination of an aristocratic or mutant bloodline would arguably involve fewer individuals than the erasure of whole culture, not to mention its millenia of history.

I don’t think wipes are cheesy personally, I like them in Star Wars, and they might have fixed this scene tolerably if used. But nope, no wipe at all. Just a cut directly to the trio finding Rey, like she just rung the doorbell to their apartment and all they had to do was run down one flight of stairs to meet her.

I forgot to mention one part of the structure that blew my mind it was so absurd.

So when Chewie, Finn, and Han are looking for Rey and running around in Starkiller base, which is presumably enormous, and of which there is zero indication that they’ve memorized the complete blueprint/layout of, they suddenly spot her across this huge chasm. SECONDS LATER, they are IN THE SAME ROOM WITH HER. THE BASE IS THE SIZE OF A SMALL CONTINENT.

Like, I know we cut the full time of them running through this or that corridor because it would be boring, that’s fine, but in this insanely huge base, how the fuck did they find the EXACT room she was in AT ALL?

No rationalizations, please. Did I miss some detail? Because this was immediately absurd to me as I watched. Like how did they even know how to get to that area across this freaking chasm, much less to orient themselves well enough to arrive at her exact level and specific room? Without a homing transponder of some sort, in real life they would be running around for potentially hours trying to connect with her location, especially since she’d be on the move at the same time.

Are we going to just rationalize this as a “the Force guided their path” moment? Ugh. I’d assume it was the Force that led the trio to see her across the chasm, sure. But the sheer amount of area and corridors to traverse and rooms to check - without being obstructed, caught, hopelessly lost, or alarms being raised either - that’s a tendon-snapping stretch.