Every time I go on the damn internet there’s this terrible annoying “SQUEEEE!” noise everywhere. Some new movie trailer is playing on half the computers on the network, I think.
I confess, I felt a strange Force tugging at me too when I saw that — I saw the original on opening day in 1977, I enjoyed The Empire Strikes Back, felt the disappointment of Return of the Jedi, although I had a kid then who was totally into it. And then came the horrible, awful, tedious prequels, and now JJ Abrams is in charge? Bleh. I’m not expecting much, which means I might actually enjoy it, thanks to diminished expectations.
But then there is other optimistic news: the racists have announced a boycott, because it features a black character in a leading role. I approve. Just stay home, racists, from everything.
Apparently the two leading characters are a black man and a woman. Can we dare to hope that the MRAs will also announce a boycott? If all the awful people would just withdraw from the world and sit and stew and fume all by themselves in hermitic isolation, the world would be a better place.
I will never like those cruciform lightsabers :(
Alas, the internet has trailers and all sorts of other despicable content about episode VII. Soon enough, it will have pirated copies of the vile filth itself. You know what you have to do, awful people.
Doesn’t matter the plot line or who the actors are. Big screen, little screen, portable device. If it says Star Wars anything but ol’ #1 (as terribly dated as it is), I’m busy with almost anything else.
Well, I normally avoid holiday openings, but since the racist POS are again’ it, I’ll just have to go.
I think I must be the only person in the world who liked the prequels more than the original run. Oh well, de gustibus non disputandum est I suppose.
On the other hand, the two leading characters of the US democrat party are a black man and a woman, and that hasn’t saved them from mediocrity for the last few years!
Ouch!
Given the inimical character of the opposition, I’ll take mediocrity, thanks.
Same here. I gave up then, haven’t bothered to see another SW flick again. I won’t see this one either, but if it means all the bigots have to sit at home all upsetty, it’s a good thing.
Okay, I watched the trailer. I saw one black person. That’s enough to send the bigots scurrying for their crayons to protest? Gad.
Well, now I definitely am going to see the movie! Wasn’t sure before, but now it’s a lock!
A black man?? AND a woman??? Suddenly I’m starting to like Star Wars a lot better!
I can’t wait to watch it with my kids. I always put Star Trek first, but Star Wars is pretty darn close.
rietpluim @ 11:
There was a black man before (Billy D. Williams) and a woman (Carrie Fisher) – it didn’t stop the SW franchise from being a white dudebro fantasyland, and this one doesn’t exactly look like it’s going to break the mold.
@12: Doctor Who.
caine @9
There was a single black person with about five minutes of screen time in Thor, and that was enough to send the bigots scurrying for their crayons, so yea, I can see it here.
Microraptor @ 15:
Oh. I didn’t see the movie (or read about either, I guess, because I completely missed that.) When it comes to Thor, I get more pissy about the need to make Thor a blonde, beautiful model type.
“A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away”… apparently white humanoid dudes were the default, and anything else is an outrage. What are the chances?
JJ Abrams — wasn’t he the dude that did a Star Trek movie that was essentially a dudebro frat party?
No way I would watch any film by him.
If it helps at all it’s mostly written by the guy who wrote The Empire Strikes Back and specifically goes out of its way to ignore the prequels.
In comparison to the original trilogy, which had a black man in a supporting role and a woman not really fighting until the later half of the films – the new central characters are the black guy and the woman. As in the actual main faces on the poster and screen time. There’s also Lupita Nyong’o – although she’s wearing a mask in the trailer but yes a black woman as well.
It may be awful but that is at least progress for event movies.
I must confess to always having a soft spot for Starwars, despite its many faults. I will enjoy the new movie all the more now knowing that the fact that the lead characters aren’t the usual default boring white dudes is causing racists and MRAs to tear their hair out in frustration.
Even if the movie turns out to be a lens flare infested mess with a poorly handled time travel plot line crammed in where it doesn’t fit (just as a totally random example unrelated to any other prior J. J. Abrams sci fi movie), it will be more than worth it for the angry bigot tears alone…
booo nostalgia.
summer ’77 was a nightmare.
I saw SW. Once. Once! One time only …
I repeat cause I had to; so many times that summer. Everyone I’d meet would ask, “did you see SW yet? How many times? I saw it it ten times so far.” I soon got so ~frustrated~ by The ubiquity of enthusiasm, I became a contrarian. Refusing to see it again, no matter what the enticement. Being a “Trekker” (not Trekkie), I cultivated the eventual growth of the “Wars vs. Trek” rivalry.
The nightmarishness was also fueled by it being my freshman summer year, first summer away from home, up in my college town. Growing into being an individual (as opposed to ___’s son.) So I rationalized my anti-SW stance as declaring myself an independent person and not “one of the crowd”.
finally (I promise): SW is a Fantasy Story wrapped in a SF camouflage, while ST is SF with a bit of fantasy here and there. Need I say more? I guess not. …. …. … Enjoy the movie.
slithey tove @ 21:
It was pretty good for me. Stood in line with half of SoCal at the Cinedome to see SW, had a good time. It was a major event for SF nerds. Didn’t get bothered by people asking if I had seen it, or any of that.
Yeah, me too. That was enough for me, but my husband saw it three times, I think.
At least they’re boycotting now rather than angrily asserting their right to cosplay in black face.
I like Star Trek, at least the ST that had Gene Roddenberry, Gene Coon, and Dorothy Fontana involved with it. However, I don’t look down my nose at those fans who prefer the later incarnations.
Know what I DO look down my nose at?
That.
Qwints @ 23:
Oh, Christ. Well, there’s my uber-depressive thought for the day.
moarscienceplz:
And some of us just sigh and look askance at this ongoing idiocy which infests SF/F fandom.
@24:
Agreed. That was my attempt at self-deprecation. It was a silly distinction, that I tried to lambast by pretending to be part of it.
How to make sure the MRA types boycott it:
Point out that even one of the main villains (Captain Phasma) is also a woman.
do they realize the most awesome and iconic character of the franchise is portrayed by a black man?
sunburst @ 28:
Oh, fuck, please tell me you aren’t referring to Darth Vader. Please.* As for the most awesome and iconic figure, you’ll get a different answer from just about every fan, you know that, right?
*Portrayed by white actors, once voiced by James Earl Jones, who did not receive credit.
@Caine
I admit there might be some disagreement about who is the most awesome character, less so about who is the most iconic. That said, most people don’t remember the actors who were inside the armor. And Darth Vader would not be nearly as cool without that wicked deep basso. (By the way, I believe he was credited on Return of Jedi!)
Sunburst @ 30:
That misses the point – the character of Darth Vader / Anakin Skywalker was never black, and was never portrayed by a black actor.
The Green Cross Man, from UK TV adverts for safely crossing the road. I don’t know if he got much credit, either.
@#14, Trebuchet
Ah, yes, now there’s a series that both the MRAs and the racists can get behind. Character who “regenerates” into a totally new persona every so often, swears it’s completely random, but manages somehow to end up as a white cis-male 12 times in a row…
I expected the racists would flip out. Expect a discussion about PC in Star Wars on Fox News.
I’m still angry about Episode I (I refused to see II & III), I’m kind of scared to see VII.
Big movie franchises re-purposed to sell Happy Meals to children assumed to be too stupid to catch nuance or to handle discomfort.
Meh.
Good on the racists squirming though.
Along the line, this game seems to have stunning and diverse characters: https://boingboing.net/2015/10/19/can-diverse-character-art-invi.html Love them.
slithey tove #26
I’m sorry. I didn’t recognize you were being snarky.
I have known far too many fanboys (in my experience, they are always male) who try to insist that *their* kind of fandom is the only worthy one, so I probably overreacted.
Terska @34,
More likely the Fox folks will treat this as a sign that Racism is Over. We’ve got a black SC justice, a black President, a black Jedi, so what are all those uppity black folks complaining about? (Throw in a quote from Dr. King for good measure.)
Or hell, maybe they’ll have a debate: Black Jedi: the end of racism or PC culture run amok?
“Well, really I think it’s both, Megyn….”
@#35
Me too!
I’ll be watching only because I love Lupito Nyongo as I’ve never watched any of the other Star Wars movies. Wonder if these racist idiots know that George Lucas’ wife and daughter are Black. Wish racists would boycott all movies so the theaters could be free of them.
I doubt this boycott will be effective anyways. Pre-order tickets are already crashing the internet.
http://deadline.com/2015/10/demand-for-the-force-awakens-preorder-tickets-crashes-fandango-others-1201588246/
I was eleven years old when Star Wars hit the theatres. My father’s alcoholism was still three years from killing him, and life, well, life was not easy. That movie overwhelmed me, I saw it four times and each time I was dizzy and giddy as the the final credits rolled. Breath holding excitement and the profound release of the same was something I’d never experienced before.
At the end of this trailer I realised that I had been holding my breath again. I felt a powerful longing that wasn’t nostalgia, it was hope. A hope that for the run time of this movie I could be taken away from problems in the same way I was back in 1977. That I could be transported, fully, to a universe where evil has the decency to identify itself unambiguously, and where the nuances of life, such as how could one both love and hate the same person with equal passion, can actually be solved.
The fact that I can identify with the central characters even though they don’t look like me is what makes this no nostalgia-fest. It’s a concrete marker of how much I’ve changed. I am no longer that bewildered and scared little boy who’s horizons are crushed down by the gravity of parental dysfunction. I may still be a damaged person, but in this one area I am a demonstrably better person than I was.
The bigot’s ire doesn’t enter into this at all. I’m going to see this movie and I’m going to celebrate how far I’ve come even if my hope is dashed. Even if it’s the disappointment that the prequels were, I owe myself that. And if I leave the theatre giddy and dizzy? That’ll just be a much appreciated bonus.
FossilFishy, good luck to you. My dad took me to the first movie, and it was the only time we ever did anything like that together.
I stiil remember telling him that the movie couldn’t possible convey the scope and size of spacecraft as drawn in the comic books. And the first star destroyer went overhead.
I dunno how many times I saw the first one, but I recall that years later I was still lurching as the point-of-view drops into the Death Star trench. And Empire was good, and some of Return, and by the last prequel I was multi-tasking while playing a bootleg copy on my laptop, the one time I bothered to try.
This trailer looks good. The ball-bot is dumb, and the explosions still aren’t right, and somebody is still making too much of the CGI, but I have a new hope. And, if I do go to the theater, I won’t have to sit next to racists.
No matter how the movie turns out, anything that causes the bitter ‘ol racists to blow a gasket has some redeeming value.
I like Star Trek and Star Wars (all three movies – would have been interesting to see some prequels to that, but I guess it’s unfortunate they never got made. I feel the same way about the Matrix – I often wonder what they’d have done in a sequel, but alas ;) ).
However, I’m deeply suspicious of the idea that Star Trek is more SF than Star Wars. Sure, Star Wars has the Force, which is a mystical element not found in hard SF. Just as well Star Trek doesn’t have any prominent aliens with elf ears that have telepathic powers, or have god like beings in both TOS and TNG, or have established (in Plato’s Stepchildren) that the key to telekinetic powers is a simple chemical treatment.
If you set the bar for SF to be “no magic”, then neither pass the test.
If you want to get a feel for his acting John Boyega plays the lead role in a film from the UK called “Attack the Block”, he’s quite good in it,. The film is well worth a watch, one of those not very well known films that’s actually quite good.
@44 garysturgess
It’s less about the existence of magic and more about the way the story is told and the things it focuses on. Star Trek is about humanity and civilization and philosophy. Star Wars is about laser swords. I generally think trying to define a genre is a useless exercise, but the only thing Star Wars and Star Trek have in common is a space-faring society.
For the record, I’m saying this as someone who loves Star Wars and thinks Star Trek is unwatchable.
Auraboy@19:
What, they dug up Leigh Brackett‘s grave, then gave her zombie body a sex-change?
llamaherder@46:
I’m not really saying that your impression is wrong, but there are plenty of people that would claim Star Trek (TOS) was about Kirk getting laid, while Star Wars was about cool space ships.
Ultimately my main issue with this sort of categorisation is with the implicit idea that the introduction of “magic” into SF “tarnishes the brand”. Not everyone intends that implication, of course, but many do – and certainly at the point one starts to say that Star Trek is more SF than Star Wars that implication is definitely felt.
There is a lot of SF that includes FTL, for example, including stories like Iain M Bank’s Culture novels, or Asimov’s Foundation/Robot novels. Perhaps that doesn’t fall under “hard” SF, but there are few people that would argue either of those examples were science fantasy. And yet, the best information we have suggests that FTL is pretty much just as magical as telekinetically throwing Senates at people.
Ultimately, stories are not good or bad depending on how hard they fall on the SF-science fantasy line. Perhaps my favourite novel of all time is Lord of Light (Zelazny), which has the external trappings of a fantasy novel (“… gods with magical powers …”), the internal trappings of SF (“… who are actually the crew of a crashed starship …”), and a very unusual story construction (to the point where it is entirely possible for a first time reader to not realise where the time jumps are). I call that SF, but I couldn’t honestly argue with anyone that called it straight fantasy, and I wouldn’t bother – because the important question is, “Is it any good?” And if that’s the question, then some Star Wars stuff is good, some Star Trek stuff is good, and both franchises have complete stinkers as well as the occasional gem. (Since you don’t like Star Trek, I’ll argue for The City On The Edge Of Forever or perhaps Let This Be Our Last Battlefield as some genuinely good examples of what the series is capable of).
garysturgess
I find this funny as most technology in SF requires just as much magic as magic does ;)
Here’s a version of Star Wars I think everybody will enjoy!
@47 NelC
Not to diminish Leigh’s original contribution but the movie made bore no resemblance to her story and the draft she submitted isn’t counted as the shooting script. Also I said the guy who wrote Empire Strikes Back, which as credited, is Kasdan.
This is the best explanation of star trek vs star wars
Okay, so. I watched the trailer on my big-screen computer, with the bass speaker cranked. Squeee, indeed.