I like the review, because it’s exactly how I felt about the movie.
One difference in our backgrounds, though: I started out as a big Star Wars fan. Loved the first one. Saw the second one and thought it was even better, because it was adding more depth and complexity to a fairly simple story. Saw the third and realized it was all going down the toilet in the name of marketing. And don’t even mention the prequels to me.
Of course, the best summary of the recent movie, even better than Sarkeesian’s, is this one.
the only TFA spoilers i've seen are that the cast consists of a badass female, an interracial gay couple & a disgruntled hot topic employee
— madison (@mtaucoin) December 28, 2015
The most impressive thing about the new star wars is its marketing.
Unfortunately, the marketing was hugely successful, which means we’re doomed to: more marketing in years to come, now that the “mega blockbuster” bar has been set higher. Loyal fans, you’re going to get your reward!
Excellent look at the movie. Right now, I’m reading The Fifth Season, by N.K. Jemisin, which, it could be said, deals with similar themes – an empire based on a traditional and very long standing social evil, imbalances of power, the oppression of certain people, and so on. The book is brutal (for some, anyway – it’s a difficult read for me), but also brilliant, and has what Star Wars doesn’t – relationships slow to form, and all the questions about attitudes, actions, and ethics, with no easy answers.
I have to say, aside from the recycled story line and the appearance of the Jar Jar Binks of the original series(C3P0), I quite liked it the new characters were interesting and to a greater extent than Star Wars usually does, fairly well developed. I Thought that Kylo Ren had about a thousand time the depth and personality than Darth Vader, whom I always thought could be replaced with a cardboard cutout without seriously affecting the movies, Loved the scenery, loved the new storm troopers but not enough development there. Who was the woman in the silver armor,? Why was her armor silver? Who’s the storm trooper with the police baton buzzy thing and why did he know who Finn was.
Out of all 4 Start Wars movies this one was definitely in my top 2.
Applause. Bravo. Exactly.
I’d like to highlight one of her comments she said in passing, i.e. “plot holes expecting the audience to fill in”. Yes.
Good story telling often relies on providing the outline story for the listener to use their imagination to “fill in the gaps”.
While having the film tell the entire story in every detail would lenghten it into TV series length, it would also degrade the story into a “soap opera” feel.
I too was both a “lover” and “critic” of this film. Reiterating my main criticism: JJ chopped up the first film (Episode iV), extracted all the good bits, then tried to remix them back into “his version” of Episode IV, renamed as Episode VII. I was left with “Fun movie, but still a remix”.
.
I did not get the “interracial gay couple” out of the Poe and Dan friendship. They interacted so briefly it was hard to assign even friendship to them, yet they pulled it off.
also have difficulty identifying the character she calls the “hot topic employee”. Han? while a “hot topic” (hot head), I don;t get the “employee” angle.
Kylo Ren=disgruntled hot topic employee.
Slithey Tove @ 4:
Read Miri on the subject: http://freethoughtblogs.com/brutereason/2015/12/26/in-defense-of-finnpoe/
Oh FFS. Have you ever heard of a thing called a search engine? It would have taken you less than a second to find out that Hot Topic is a clothing and accessory store, heavily based on pop culture.
Finn-Poe is also an example of what Sarkeesian is criticizing: it’s not in the movie at all. People are taking the bare bones skeleton of the story and fleshing it out with lots of detail, and then praising the movie for it, undeservedly.
PZ:
I understand people shipping, and I certainly understand the wishful thinking, because it would be great if any major franchise (especially one as huge as Star Wars) would have the requisite guts to feature such a relationship.
What I don’t understand is blindly praising a movie maker for something that is simply wishful thinking on the part of those who aren’t represented much at all.
“Out of all 4 Start Wars movies this one was definitely in my top 2.”
Interesting Freudian slip… Start Wars :-)
Anita brought up a really good point that occurred to me briefly while watching the movie, but I didn’t quite keep hold of it. Finn’s transition to the good side is really odd. He knows he’s just another storm trooper, and yet he seems completely comfortable with shooting his fellow soldiers down and fighting them once he loses the armor. That… is really sloppy.
Thing is, I grasped a part of that idea; now that we know a storm trooper without the armor, suddenly the audience has to consider every storm trooper without armor. What are they like? What do they look like? How do they think? Suddenly they aren’t just faceless mooks for the heroes to slaughter, even though we don’t see their faces. This movie does a really good job having the troopers act like individuals as well; we see them pulling citizens around and threatening them with guns, not just marching in lockstep and firing from a standstill. And yet the movie didn’t really seem to care about recognizing that there could be more Finns out there.
But I didn’t make the connection back to Finn; of all the people in the movie, he should be showing the most conflict. And yeah, that scene where he’s fighting the trooper with the buzz baton; no trying to convince the guy to switch sides? No appeals for why he left? Just right to the fight? I hope they address it in later movies, at least. They’ve got to at least have Finn tell us how in the world he was able to leave in the first place.
Marcus @1
Yup. We live in a world where movies are seen as failures because they’re not profitable enough.
http://www.bleedingcool.com/2015/09/03/avengers-age-of-ultron-was-considered-a-failure-at-disney-and-what-happened-next/
http://www.forbes.com/sites/scottmendelson/2013/08/01/the-wolverine-waterworld-and-other-flops-that-werent/
Caine @ 6 “Oh FFS. Have you ever heard of a thing called a search engine? It would have taken you less than a second to find out that Hot Topic is a clothing and accessory store, heavily based on pop culture.”
I didn’t know what the term meant either and I had a lot of difficulty figuring out what Hot Topic was, even after I googled the term. From the tweet, it wasn’t clear to me that Hot Topic was a shop–I thought it might just have been a phrase I just didn’t understand because I’m not up on pop culture. :-/ I’m glad you explained what it was because I would have just given up trying to figure it out and it’s a very funny comment once you understand.
Anita is spot on in the problems with the film. I found the movie to be rather boring. I don’t say that to be a hater, but I’ve seen all of the action sequences before, I was hoping for more character development. They almost got it with Kylo-Ren, I really liked his temper tantrums, but everything else just felt two dimensional. My wife felt the same way, but my 11 and 7yos really liked; but Disney knows how to market to children. I really think that fans are mostly talking themselves into liking this, because it’s Star Wars and it’s not the prequels.
lb @ 12:
Hot Topic has been around since the 80s. Used to shop there myself, a hundred years ago.
I do not disagree with the criticisms, but I still liked the movie while also thinking that it could have been better. I personally do not understand the choice of outright rejecting a movie just because it does not fill all expectations for fully fleshed out characters and depth of plot. It is a hugely poofed out kid movie, after all.
‘Shippers gotta ‘ship – I saw this imgur graphic that has Rey saying, “This is my boyfriend Finn and Finn’s boyfriend Poe”
http://i.imgur.com/PbCmAZ7h.jpg
I think I’d have liked the casting a bit better if the hot shot, competent fighter pilot was the black guy and the somewhat cowardly, only thinking of himself, no real plans or motivation character was the white guy.
As it stands, Finn just reminded me of “The Black Sidekick” stereotypes too much.
To be fair, the huge, gaping plot holes in The Force Awakens are themselves marketing devices. Disney has declared that the Extended Universe — works that Paramount has been authorizing for 30 years to flesh out the Star Wars universe — are no longer canon because they have gone and commissioned their own works. Many.
Star Wars: Lost Stars by Claudia Gray has gotten very good reviews; Star Wars: Aftermath by Chuck Wendig, not so much. Both fill in what happened in the 30 years since the destruction of the Death Star II and the death of Palpatine. Three young adult novels flesh out the now official back story of the three characters of The New Hope trilogy: Moving Target by Cecil Castellucci and Jason Fry (Leia), Smuggler’s Run by Greg Rucka and Phil Noto (Han), and The Weapon of a Jedi by Jason Fry (Luke.) There are two video games set in this time period, Star Wars: Uprising for Android devices and Star Wars: Battlefront for console machines. Through their new Marvel division, Disney has released a comic book, Shattered Empire #1, which will be part of a new series of Star Wars comics.
If you are not interested in wading through all this merchandising, IO9 has pulled together a lot of this official back story and summarized it in Everything We Know About Star Wars‘ Post-Return of the Jedi Future, which is a pretty good read.
The Star Wars Expanded Universe was never considered canon. George Lucas was very up-front that while authors could write books for it, he wasn’t going to following anything there when it came to future movies. The only thing Disney did was stop publishing new works set in the EU (which was an increasingly convoluted mess of rabid fanfics and superweapon stupidity anyway) and reprint them under the Star Wars Legends line to make it more clear to new readers that it wasn’t set in the same continuity as the new movies or cartoons.
@10 Chris
I thought about that too, while watching the film. They probably didn’t think about it in writing, but my rationalization for it is that Finn has experienced first hand how thorough the brainwashing, the roboticness of his former co-workers is. He doesn’t have the backup or the resources to take prisoners, so he chooses the best chance of his and his new comrades’ survival, all-out battle against an enemy that’s 100% merciless. The chance of discovering another conscience-ridden trooper may be 1/a million, and that conversation will hardly take place in a firefight.
Remember how the rebels took stormtroopers prisoner in RotJ? Well, it was before the Empire sent backup and overpowered the Rebels, who were then in turn rescued by the Ewok ambush. So none of those prisoners might have survived. But I do hope they’ll have a place for more turned or hesitant characters in further pictures or various spinoffs that I’m sure we’ll have for longer than I’ll be alive.
I can see why the new movie stuck to the relative lack of complexity on good versus evil. Fans didn’t exactly reward the Prequels for trying to introduce new politics – remember the complaints about the “trade tax dispute” in Phantom Menace?
No. I think thy were drowned out by all the complains about midichlorians and Jar-Jar Binks.
This was actually my first time watching one of Anita’s videos. I found it… fair, balanced and accurate? Go figure! Seriously though, I personally liked the film with my main criticism pertaining only to the recycled plot. In fact, after leaving the theatre my friends and I couldn’t stop joking about (spoilers!) Luke being a just new Yoda to Rey in Episode VIII, inverted speech mannerisms and all. Truth is, I just love my mindless escapism and I’m not ashamed to admit it.
@microraptor #19 – I was never much interested in the novels, so my apologies for getting their canonical status wrong. But my point is that these new works are intended to plug the back story and plot holes in the movie, which were deliberately included in the movie to sell these new works. Media merchandizing at its every worst.
@20 Felix:
None of those Imperial troopers survived. The Ewoks consumed them and used their helmets as drums.
One of the more laughable things in the new movie is a sun-fueled space gun. If you can extinguish a sun, you’ll kill off the planets without blowing them up.
It seemed like a reboot of the first Star Wars, but then J.J. Abrams is not known for originality. I was really puzzled by his overhead shot of Rey over Finn’s body and her screaming “Khan!”
Typical of action movie morality: goons can be mown down by the hundred with little to no provocation without the good team losing their good team status. Worse, it always, always, undermines any sentimental moment a movie attemps in my view. Oh no, the bad guy murdered your friend / parent / child / puppy / etc? You murdered 200 people to get revenge, big fucking deal.
It’s also in america, meaning the rest of us had no familiarity. I thought ‘disgruntled Hot Topic employee’ was Han as well.
Caine @ 14 LOL! I’m rather embarrassed to say I have never heard of the place and I was in my 20’s back then!
Golly – the characters are not very deep and the story is a rerun of IV. BFD. It’s brain candy. It is not great cinema. Hell, it’s barely mediocre cinema but it is entertaining. Lots of explosions and violence and obvious plot twists. The stuff that sells.
I found Ex Machina to be a far better thoughtful movie and one that raises a number of interesting issues. It grossed 36 million. TFA has done 1.23 Billion so far internationally. It would appear that for mass audiences and plain ol’ money making, K.I.S.S.
Knight In Sour Armor @25
You joke, but damn it, now that I think about it there’s no reason that wouldn’t have happened. Ewoks are probably omnivorous and they do carry spears which are likely used for hunting. There is no reason for them to see non-Ewok animals as another food source.
Of course, the blowing up of the Death Star killed them all off so there’s no way to find out for sure that this had happened…
Anita’s analysis is excellent, as always, and I agree with most of it. One thing that did interest me is that she barely mentions Kylo Ren, who I rather liked as a villain, and who seems to help address one of Anita’s principle complaints about Star Wars to some degree since his character appears to already be subverting a simplistic good/evil dichotomy in the story since, while he does terrible things and kills innocent people, he is also clearly extremely conflicted and troubled by his actions, with his outbursts of destructive, violent anger being manifestations of that inner conflict.
Without really clarifying Ren’s motivations, the movie strongly suggests that he has fallen under the influence of Supreme Leader Snoke, who appears to be far a stronger and more dominant personality, which is perhaps a reference to a Star Wars version of political radicalisation. Frankly, I already find Ren’s character and the depiction of his moral compass to be more compelling after one movie than Anakin’s was after three, though admittedly that is somewhat of a low bar. There is ample room to further develop his character over the next two movies, affording the potential to make him the most layered and nuanced villain in the history of the franchise, if handled properly.
On balance, I agree that this movie has several flaws, but for the most part I find them forgivable. The real test of whether this new trilogy will have legs will come with the critical second movie. A recycled plot used to convince the viewing public that this is too the Star Wars movie series they are looking for can be overlooked in the first movie in the sequence, but you can’t get away with it after that. Episode VIII will have to forge its own path if this thing is going to work out – if that movie opens with a major battle upon an icebound planet, I will really start to get worried…
I would also definitely like to see a slightly more adventurous approach to the moral conflict in Star Wars going forward as Anita suggests; imagine a scenario where Finn considers that, if he could break free from the conditioning of the First Order, perhaps other Storm Troopers can as well. Perhaps he could be more concerned with their humanity than the other characters, having been one himself, and when he has time to think (in a moment when his ex-colleagues aren’t actively trying to kill him) perhaps he could hatch a plan to bring down the First Order by starting a rebellion within the Storm Trooper ranks themselves, thus working to liberate people who are in truth victims of the First Order leadership as much as any of those crushed under the white-booted heel of their ranks. In that sense, he might have an arc not unlike that of Teal’c from the original Stargate TV series of a few years back.
But of course! MISANDRY!!!
I thought the “inter-racial gay couple” referred to Han and Chewbacca.
Hot Topic’s only foreign stores are a handful in Canada, so most non-Americans are likely to know of it only if they’ve heard references to it in US pop culture
@liz321
Not having seen the movie , that is what I thought too.
Kreator @ 33;
I can only imagine the swarms of hurt man-geek fee-fees this video will unleash. I suspect the attempted counter arguments will follow the usual pattern of photo shopping images of her into pornography. That seems to be the closest thing the MRAs have to an argument, which really tells you all you need to know about both their position and their decency (or rather lack thereof) as human beings.
@ Gregory Greenwood
MRA/PUA/MGTOW fee-fees are already deeply wounded by Rey and Finn.
David Aurini, would-be filmmaker (“The Sarkeesian Effect”) and professional poseur, sez that the film castrates men:
http://www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/2015/12/26/aurini-seeing-star-wars-the-force-awakens-is-the-equivalent-of-auto-castration/
Which is generally how the Jedi and other “good guys” act in the movies as well. The complaint I guess is that Finn changed so abruptly over to the light side, but even the Jedi themselves spend very little time (especially in the middle of a battle) negotiating or finding a peaceful way to end a conflict. If you thought the Federation droids in the prequels weren’t conscious, then it wouldn’t be an issue (probably deliberate, to make it both kid-friendly and filled with violent action sequences), but otherwise they are just killing lots of Nazis … er, Stormtroopers … without so much as a second thought. That’s just how it is, and to me Finn seemed to blend right into that picture just fine.
I’d say that if it’s good enough for Yoda, it’s good enough for the rest of the light side. That is to say, it’s not very good, but that makes for less of a contrast (not more) between light and dark, so Finn’s assimilation to the light side isn’t actually that much of a transition. If he really lived up to all of the talk (from the Jedi/rebels), then he would indeed stick out like a sore thumb — because that’s not how any of them actually are, once they’re done talking and patting themselves on the back for being the good guys. So why would Finn be a problem character, instead of someone like Yoda who’s supposed to have already gotten his shit together but clearly hasn’t? Is it that Finn (or anybody) should be conflicted because of loyalty or something like that, and if so what could that genuinely have to do with morality?
It’s not clear to me what moral gray-areas (or whatever) Sarkeesian thinks the films should explore. I was getting some anti-realist vibes from her video, and if that’s her take on things, oh well, but I at least don’t think it’s fair to expect everyone else to buy into that (and make their movies about it). It’s also not obvious what’s supposed to be the problem with a universe like that (one governed by a magical Force, with light and dark sides) having extremely polarized characters. But even so, there are exceptions, like Han Solo, who tend to be closer to the middle of the good/evil spectrum — or just about all of the Jedi, for that matter, as I said above.
If you want the good guys to be even less good than they are, then there will come a point where we shouldn’t be rooting for anybody. (On the other hand, it’s nice when villains get somewhat sympathetic portrayals, because they can still be effective as villains, like Kylo Ren, even when they’re not so utterly depraved that they’re unrealistic as people.) But they apparently didn’t want to fill their world up with anti-heroes or otherwise some collection of unlikeable assholes fighting each other, although that can work in some films; and it’s not a very interesting criticism that you expected them to tell a completely different kind of story than the one they set out to make.
liz321 @ 34:
That would be inter-species, not inter-racial.
Lady Mondegreen @ 38:
Oh for fuck’s sake, there aren’t even words. I suppose it would have been much too much to expect Aurini to at least place his sentiment somewhere in reality land – perhaps the film is like a kick to the testicles for some men. Castration? Oh, I don’t think so. Poor, unmanned Aurini.
Anita gave a great review. Very accurate.
She didn’t look at one thing I actually loved: Leia and Han. It was one of the few relationships that wasn’t tissue thin and had a little complexity. I thought Fisher and Ford were amazing. The weariness, sadness and ground down feel to both characters was wonderful. They were two of the few characters who seemed to have human motivations. They weren’t just a happy ever after with genetically Mary Sue kids. The outcome of their marriage made a lot of sense with the little bit of backstory that we got. Leia’s feelings and motivations resonated realistically for me. I think that Ford managed some nice subtlety at a few points in Han’s arc.
Besides, I should add that we don’t see Finn as anything like a dark side character anyway. Basically the only thing we find out about him (much later) is that he was a janitor, FFS. We do see him appalled by what the First Order was doing, apparently at the first battle he fought in, or perhaps the first where that kind of carnage and destruction was on full display for him. So he simply decided to fight against them. It’s not hard at all to imagine a real person acting that way, even if many wouldn’t want to take the risks involved in defecting (and helping a prisoner escape).
@10, Chris:
I had the same reaction to Finn’s switching sides, plus a dash of “oh, what a cop out” when it was revealed that the battle he lost his nerve in also happened to be his very first battle, and that he’d never killed anyone before becoming ‘good’ (and murdering just /dozens/ of stormtroopers/officers in his escape). It could have been a more interesting story (I felt) if he’d been a moderately-seasoned fighter, who came to realise the horror of what he was doing. Might have given him more depth. Alternatively, if they wanted to go with “never killed before”, they could have at least made him a little more reluctant to start massacring his former companions.
@21, brett:
I’m just going off memory here, but I don’t think the prequels were /really/ any more nuanced in terms of the complexities of good and evil. I mean, they were complicated, and often bewilderingly so, but the relationship between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ seemed fairly straightforward.
For the audience, at least, right from the beginning of the Phantom Menace, the ‘bad guy’ was clear. It was the obviously evil robed dude (Palpatine), who was instructing the Trade Federation in their blockade. The characters within the movie may not have known that, but ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are clearly delineated for the audience pretty much from the first five minutes. They might have been able to do something interesting with the Trade Federation realizing that they were being used, and changing sides because of it, in the second/third movies, but they didn’t – instead, they were so obsessed with “revenge” on Queen Amidala that they kept working with the evil robed guy, and even kept his existence a secret when they were captured at the end of Phantom Menace.
@26 greg hilliard:
As far as laughable sun-fueled superweapons, I too found it pretty funny. In the movie’s (partial) defence of this weapon, however, they briefly mentioned (some time after it was first used) that it sent the beams through hyperspace to its targets – thus, you don’t have to enter the same system as your enemies and risk attack while you’re slurping up their sun, I suppose. Also, I’m not sure pulling an entire star’s worth of energy through the atmosphere of a planet you’re standing on is very safe. I feel like it would probably ignite the atmosphere, at the very least.
They didn’t mention the mechanics of the superweapon till /after/ it was first used, too, which led to some personal confusion when it looked like the superweapon was firing its beams at the republic planets from within the same system – which happened to contain all five major Republic worlds AND the secret space tavern. Being in a different system and firing via hyperspace makes a /bit/ more sense, but…how close were those republic planets to each other and the space tavern planet, that the effects were immediately visible on ALL of them?!
Oh, and lest we forget:
@25 and @31:
It’s not necessarily a joke, considering how close Luke/Leia and friends came to being roasted alive by the Ewoks, before C3PO and his godlike powers intervened on their behalf.
Am I the only one who thought that the ultimate evil bad guy, Snoke, looked like Brain, as in Pinky and the Brain from the Animanics animated TV show?
Sure, projection technology was used, but projection technology could be set to show the big bad at a different scale….
Spoiler! Snoke is only 15 cm tall! Ant… meet boot.
And how does a 20+ year-old get command of the entire First Order? At least in the originals, the generals were experienced military officers. The First Order high command appears to have just left high school.
It was better than the prequels I’ll grant you. But Lucas left Joseph Campbell’s vision behind a long time ago.
The best part of the movie was probably Han and Leia’s reunion. There was so much there, in such a short time.
I enjoyed it, but then again, I’m easily drawn into movies.
PZ (#7)
I don’t know that they’re praising the movie for their own added details so much as praising it for offering them an attractive set of bones on which to do that fleshing out. It seems like popular media is more and more about what fandoms can make out of the bones and less about what flesh the original has to offer. The less flesh, the easier it is to make what you want out of it.
It’s all about the merchandizing”
@45 flex:
It was an interesting setup for a projection, for a little bit there I thought Snoke might actually have been 30+ feet tall.
Also, I think Kylo Ren’s status amongst the First Order is pretty similar to that of Darth Vader’s status amongst the Empire (although perhaps even a bit better?) – both Vader and Kylo Ren aren’t high-ranking officials in the military so much as they are the ‘favourite’ of the Emperor/Supreme Leader. The real military generals treated Vader with contempt, as some sort of weird monk with nebulous powers, who was only there because he was the Emperor’s right hand man, and not because of any commanding rank. They worked with him, but he was mostly just an attachment, or an annoyance. Like if a high-up government official was sent to work with a local police force – he might ‘technically’ be important, but in the immediate command structure, he’s a nobody.
There’s probably a better analogy to be made re: command structures in actual military, or if, idk, Hitler sent his favourite personal bodyguard to hang out with the generals – the guy is obviously important, but he’s not a /general/.
And a similar thing with Kylo Ren – he’s not /really/ in charge, he’s just sort of there. Like Vader, he has some authority, but he shares it with the General. He personally leads people into battle, but has his own ‘honour guard’ rather than being part of the attack proper. He’s probably a bit more respected than Darth Vader, though, because where Vader would just sort of stalk around and choke people, Kylo actually gets in the fights properly and kills dudes, and does super impressive stuff like holding blaster shots in midair, in front of everybody.
Also, he gets a bit of a boost since (I am told) the First Order has a bit of an Emperor/Vader-worshipping thing going on, having finally realised how cool Force powers are.
Oh, and he’s apparently in his late 20s. Like, 29 or something. I know, I wouldn’t have thought so either.
Kylo Ren or Darth Petulant as I call him, irritated the fuck out of me. He starts the film as someone quite impressive and then devolves into a whiny, little idiot who engages in light saber tantrums when things don’t go his way. Vader never did that sort of shit.
And don’t get me started on the waste of Captain Phasma.
I really enjoyed this Fem Freq video: it’s lively and upbeat without any gushing, and nuanced in its criticism. As important as Tropes vs Women in Video Games has been in the ongoing dialogue about the way video games portray women, there were a few missed opportunities to consider alternate interpretations or other points of view, and where Anita expressed her opinions with an air of defensive certainty that almost seemed to anticipate an angry backlash (which, to be fair, yeah…). The thing I really loved about Anita’s older fem freq videos was the raw, off-the-cuff vibe and her snarky sense of humor. Obviously she was never going to be able to keep that tone once she had the role of planet Earth’s preeminent feminist media critic forced upon her and simultaneously became the permanent target of internet awfulness, but this video was still great even just as a change of pace.
Her criticism of the good vs evil, binary morality of the Star Wars universe is perfectly valid, though it has never bothered me. I suspect this has something to do with what I expect to get out of a Star Wars movie: I would not, for example, accept such in simplistic worldview if it was presented in Star Trek. That said, I certainly wouldn’t mind if Abrams, Kasdan, Johnson & co. are planning to subvert good guys/bad guys dichotomy. There was a missed opportunity to do this in Jedi: in one scene that didn’t make the final cut, the imperial officers in the Death Star’s control room are seen to question their orders and the righteousness of their cause. Finn’s defection sets up Rian Johnson with a second chance to explore this narrative path: “I Borg” anyone?
Also PZ and Anita are wrong about Finn-Poe: the relationship is absolutely earned. Finn rescued Poe, and Poe rescued Finn. They shared an experience that was probably the most important in each of their lives up to that point, certainly in Finn’s case. Then they’re reunited after believing each other dead, and react with the kind of unbridled joy that feels completely true to the characters and their friendship. Incidentally, Star Wars is really good when its actors can portray genuine human feeling – who’da thunk?
Very tangentially, does anyone else think Snoke happens to be a very lame name in general, but especially for the big bad guy? Though the usual naming conventions for the dark side were also pretty damn silly, for more or less the opposite reason: Darth Plagueis, Darth Sidious, Darth Andeddu (pronounced undead-oo) for fucks sake!
Naming conventions may be beside the point of this thread, but I wish they could strike some sort of balance. A name can be somewhere in between ‘cutesy baby talk dog name’ and ”trying too damn hard to advertise just how eeeeeevil this guy is’ please.
@48 Solomon Steltzer,
I wasn’t thinking about Kylo Ren, but about the rest of the First Order. Their leader looked like he was barely 20, and the rest of the commanders appeared no older. (Maybe this was an Ender’s Game tie-in?) At least the Empire’s generals in episode 4: ANH were older and experienced.
I’ve mixed feelings about Kylo Ren. Both Anakin and Ben Solo had some jedi training in stoicism, but Anakin had quite a bit more before he turned to Vader. So I can believe that when Ben turned to Kylo he night not have quite as much control over his emotions as Darth did. And Anakin had more practice at deception and self-control, after a years-long romance with Padme. So I can see it being easier for Kylo to fly into fits of rage.
But what I can’t understand is why those fits of rage only involved swinging a light saber around. I would expect force-lighting, bent girders, force-choked storm troopers flying into mysteriously appearing gorges, etc. Instead, it’s just a lot of saber-bashing. Maybe loosing your control also means losing your force powers? If so, then some good trash-talk during a fight would work well for Rey and Finn when they encounter Kylo next.
I’m sorry, but I’ve grown to hate Star Wars. I remember being sufficiently entertained when it came on in free TV as a kid, but since then I’ve become an adult and I have to say SW has been broken from the start in terms of gender politics and intellectual depth.
http://www.strangehorizons.com/2005/20051003/star-wars-a.shtml
The continued sway the franchise holds over popular culture makes me wonder if it’s just nostalgia and a multimillion dollar marketing machine brainwashing general audiences or whether America tries to install it as a substitute for a national epic.
The characters within the movie may not have known that, but ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are clearly delineated for the audience pretty much from the first five minutes.
That was one of the things that drove me absolutely nuts about star wars: its shallow and naive approach to the question of good versus evil. The good guys do pretty much the same stuff as the bad guys. How do we know they’re good? Because of clothing. In fact clothing substitutes for character development (and to a large degree, acting)
They’re just such mediocre movies. It’s a tribute to how much crap Hollywood can shovel that they’re even considered interesting other than the fantastic pew pew pew effects and fun costumes.
I’ve noticed some interesting developments they’ve made with Kylo Ren. For instance, he’s demonstrated how immensely pointless lightsabers can actually be. Spoiler Alert: Ren sucks with a lightsaber (so the fact that his looks goofy doesn’t matter), but he has a mastery over the force we haven’t seen demonstrated before in the movies.
@54
I really want some director to explore this, because it would make for such a compelling story. The Jedi used to enjoy such hegemonic privilege before their downfall. The members are given such positions in society in a variety of roles, and they have no experience. They get to be freaking generals without having to work through the ranks. In the Clone Wars series, a padowan, someone barely more than a child, outranks the clone-troopers, who have all been bred and trained specifically for war, and even for specialized combat and support roles.
No one has addressed this, and it would make for such an interesting conflict, because the Rebels and Resistance have continued the same deference for the Jedi as the Republic. And when have they ever truly demonstrated that there is a light and a dark side to the force?
I actually really enjoyed the movie even through the apparent plot holes. But, I didn’t have super high expectations. And the cinematography was pretty good.
gmacs:
Yet Ren was out-Willed, out-Forced and out-Fought by an utterly untrained and naive slip of a woman.
(Where was Stimpy, anyway?)
Did you see the hairy, neckless alien who was helping the Resistance pilots get their ships working?
@49
He did when younger. He also endlessly pursued his pet targets by sending fleets of large ships full of thousands of personnel into asteroid fields. Oh, and he choked high-ranking, experienced officers for failing to achieve the goals of impossible missions.
Anakin never learned to be a leader.
Huh. When I read that tweet, I just assumed that the ‘interracial gay couple’ was Han and Chewbacca. But I guess that involves a long list of assumptions, of which the assumption that their relationship is romantic is probably the least unlikely. Some others include:
That Chewie is male;
That Wookies even have sexual dimorphism, rather than being hermaphroditic or having some sort of sexual polymorphism, or having gender assigments that naturally change over time;
That Wookies engage in anything that humans would recognize as ‘romantic relationships’ or ‘sexual intercourse’;
Holy shit I’m analyzing a DIsney movie for sexual subtext what the hell is wrong with me.
It’s OK Scott.
you’ll fit in here
No, Star wars The Force Awakens was terribly written. Within the first few minutes it was bad. A few times I wanted to just leave the theater. There was no drive, and everything seemed perfunctory and uninteresting. The worlds were awesome and seemed both real and fantastic, but all prominent chartacters and plot where just random empty gibberish. It was bad. Though yes after watching one review I now see that the bad masked guy was one of the best written characters in it, and there were some moments that somehow were very good, but it was all drowned out with everything in between those moments.
In my opinion. I hope, if “Plinkett” isn’t going to trash this one then maybe Film Crit Hulk will. I can only hope.
Hm, I’m surprised that Sarkeesian didn’t point out the issues I noticed. I’m pretty sure the film suffered from some of the same flaws she has pointed out before, where the woman only gets to “kick ass” after the she is saved by a man, and the battle is already won, so the scene is pointless. This is what happened with the light saber fight at the end (if I recall correctly) it didn’t matter at all that Rey fought the bad guy. That was just an eye candy scene irrelevant to the plot. Same with early in the movie when Finn first sees her, is going to help, but she takes care of herself. It had nothing to do with the plot (and Finn even saves her immediately after, because she would have died if he didn’t drag her by the hand out of the building that was immediately blown up). Those kind of weird semiotic dynamics were (I think) completely absent when Rey saved Finn (in a random plot-irrelevant part with alien monsters).
Plus the movie had various weird comments about “women”. Didn’t anyone notice that? Or is my internal “sexism alarm bell” misinforming me? I don’t recall what the comments were now, except the “women always find out the truth” bit which was odd but not the part that made me think “frat party” during the movie…I wish I could remember.
Brian @62:
“Women always find out the truth” was Han telling Finn that he should come clean about who he really was to Rey. Han knew that Finn wasn’t part of the Resistance and was warning him that attempting to keep with the charade was going to bite him in the ass.
@microraptor, 63
Yes, I knew what he meant when he said that.
There was a different exchange in the movie that I was more concerned about, but I can’t remember what it was now.
microraptor @ 63:
Even without having seen the movie, I understand what Brian’s getting at. “Women always find out the truth” smacks of all the old saws about women’s intuition, and women’s ability to sniff out if someone is having an affair, and all that crap. There’s a wealth of sexism under that little line, even if it isn’t terribly obvious to most people. It would have been much better to have the line read “people always find out the truth”, because at least that truism wouldn’t be reinforcing subconscious sexism.
Adding to mine @ 66:
Also, using the specific “women always find out the truth” drops women back into their special little pool again, rather than including us in the larger people pool.