The Glade 4.0

I thoroughly enjoyed the movie.

That said, they could have saved a lot of money and just dubbed new dialogue into Episode IV and called it Episode VII.

Seriously, another death star?
The lightsaber was lost on Cloud City. Don't "force" it.
Luke Solo (Rey) was good, but hardly original.
Droid with a secret rolling around the desert.
Landing party to take the shield down.
Aging mentor gets whacked.

I loved the villain. Powerful, but conflicted - inexperienced, quick to tantrum, scared. This is a new sith. More human. Ultimately weaker, but the potential for him is high - and with the death of solo he may have solved some of his conflict. He may be more evil than any of the others. With the others, you saw what they were - he feels the conflict and chooses evil. He's also the most ambitious and driven sith since Palpatine.

Fin is by far the best character. Pretty much the only multi-dimensional character in the film.

Poe can suck it. Come on, "he's the best pilot in the resistance!" ok, great. We got it the first time you said it.

I get somewhat tired of the overdone hero aspect of all of these films. It was nauseating when it was Anakin, particularly in Episode I.

Still, the feel of the movie - dirty, old, beat up - was more reminiscent of the OT than the clean, computerized second set. I'm a fan, and eagerly waiting the next installment.

I'm looking forward to it too. I'm hoping they ran out of things to copy from the original movies.

I finally got to watch it yesterday, I've been avoiding spoilers like the plague. The best analogy I can come up with to describe my thoughts on it is this.

It is like having a home that you absolutey love, but that home was destroyed by a fire. Someone has rebuilt that home for you. Sure, there are some things that just don't feel right, things that are out of place, and the contents just aren't yours, but hey, it is good to be home.

At the end of the day, that's how I felt, like I had finally returned home. The story was a bit derivative, but in a way I think maybe they did that to get fans to come back.

I can see why some would be upset with Kylo Ren's personality, but I look at it like this. Ren is not Vader. We knew Vader was a cold calculated bad ***, that was why young Anikin's behavior was so jarring, it just didn't fit. Ren is a completely new character, and we don't really have any back story to set up his character, and it remains to be seen where they go with it.

I think my worst reaction to anything in the movie was, "oh god, another Deathstar? And this one is built inside an entire planet?"

Also, I think the idea of Rey being Luke's child is maybe a bit too obvious. I saw an interesting theory last night. Maybe she is a descendant "grand child" of Obi Wan.

I'd considered this, actually (independantly - I hadn't seen anyone else suggest it yet.) Obi-Wan did have a secret love interest (and it's still canon, it was explored in the Clone Wars cartoon, which Disney incorporated into canon.) Satine Kryze died childless, though. Of course, 20 years alone as a hermit on Tattooine could have provided more opportunities, but that is a bit boring.

I have a half-formed idea in my head that Rey was one of Luke's padawans as he tried to rebuild the order, and in the end, it was not Kylo Ren's betrayal that caused him to go into hiding, but that it was his most powerful apprentice, Rey that went to the dark side. Perhaps Luke did not want to kill her, wiped her mind and left her on Jakku.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Okay, so I took my kids to see the movie yesterday. They enjoyed it, and I thought it was fine, for what it was. And what it is is merely the advertisement that George Lucas is no longer making the movies and that there will be more movies in the future. What it isn't, is good. I have not read through this thread so as to remain unbiased as I put down my thoughts, and I also managed not to have anything spoiled for me prior to seeing the movie. So everything below is uninfluenced by any outside forces. See what I did there? I am **** witty.

And now, in no particular order.

"Kylo Ren" must be long time ago far far away speak for "Scott Evil"

Amongst the First Order's weaponry are such diverse elements as surprise, fear, ruthless efficiency, and a fanatical devotion to the ... oh wait, wrong script.

When you're the government in power, you don't get to call your armed forces "The Resistance". At best, you could call them "The Empowered". Otherwise, the Armed Forces of the Galactic Republic.

I feel like I just watched the original Star Wars again. There's a desert planet, a planetbuster superweapon, a trench run, a cantina, skulking around the enemy base to disable something, and the wise old mentor getting gacked by the villain.

If your superweapon requires the entire energy output of the nearby star, how are you going to fire it twice?

How does a star fit inside a planet? Science tells us it doesn't. I realize that Star Wars isn't exactly long on the scientific basis, historically, but come on.

She's gone from suck to blow.

How did Kylo Ren kill the rest of Luke Skywalker's apprentices, when he couldn't even handle one untrained girl who had just figured out the Jedi mind trick, and had only a basic, street fighter's knowledge of armed combat?

No matter how nearby other star systems are, they don't get to see the superweapon's fire trail. At least, not for years.

When you're aware of the possibility that some psychopathic, tyrannical entity could blow up your planet, why aren't you defending against that possibility? You've had almost 40 years.

"Complete his training"? Maybe you should have actually begun it. He doesn't Force push, Force choke, Force lightning, Jedi jump, or have even a basic facility with a **** lightsaber. He can Force immobilize and mind read. That's all he's got.

People got hit with lightsaber blades and didn't get lopped into pieces. That's not how that works.

I have to assume that the writers meeting went something like this:
"Okay, we're going to have a superweapon that devours the nearby star to power it, and it'll be so big we'll put it in a planet."
"Are you going to build a propulsion system into the planet?"
"Why?"
"Otherwise, you could only fire it once."
"I don't follow, and you shouldn't worry about it."
"If you devour the star, and you can't move the planet, you don't have another energy source to fire it again."
"You shouldn't worry about it."
"You can keep repeating that, but it won't make me believe it--Holy crap I've got a great idea for another scene!"

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So J.J. Abrams is the Kilgrave creepy stalker rapist of Star Wars fans? I can get behind that.

_________________
"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

_________________
Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

We only saw part of the Galactic Republic for a few seconds staring up in terror at a bright light in the sky. The First Order controls this corner of the galaxy, and the "resistance" was the group trying to dislodge them.



I know, right? All my complaints about this movie focus on Starkiller Base. I am assuming the planet was mobile and hyperdrive capable. I know it strains credulity, but then I realized it didn't strain credulity any more than the Death Star did in the first place, so **** it. But a little exposition on the thing's capabilities would be nice, people.



I never got the impression the planet sucked up the star...just absorbed the star's energy. That star is now a dead cinder of carbon and iron. Even if that's not the case and it actually sucks up the material of a star, don't forget, when a star 1.4 times the mass of our own sun collapses into a neutron star, it is only 20kms in diameter. A smaller star could be packed into a much smaller ball. That's some kickass gravity manipulation then...but... the tech in Star Wars is already so incredibly impossible I don't care.



Again, you had Kaffis's reaction to Rey. I had a different one, "Who is she, who trained her, and why doesn't she remember?" I am sure we'll get that answer in Episode VIII.



Again, I know, right? That was my SINGLE BIGGEST COMPLAINT right there. J.J. has no concept of either the distance between stars, or how slow light moves in relation to that distance (or both.) He demonstrated the same problem in Star Trek.


Who, now?



To be fair, they didn't show the results of any people he chopped with lightsaber blades. Lor San Tekka is probably in at least two pieces.

_________________
Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

J.J. Abram's concept of physics and distance is just fine. He does not need any additional education on it.

The Starkiller does have some apparent problems, but the fundamental fact is that Star Wars technology is SO advanced compared to us that not only do we not know how it works, we can't even begin to guess - yet it obviously DOES work in that universe.

Structures like the Death Star or even the Super Star Destroyers should be impossible to build and then have move under their own power - with materials we are familiar with. Subjected to acceleration stresses, they should collapse of their own mass. They don't; obviously Star Wars has materials of phenomenal strength compared to anything we know of. This shouldn't be a surprise or cause any "suspension of disbelief" issues - Star Wars has had the ability to fly FTL for 25,000 years at a minimum whereas we are just only barely beginning to theorize how we might go about doing so; we have not had recognizable civilization for that long yet.

The Death Star was powered by something called "hypermatter." We don't have the foggiest idea what that does or how it works, but we do know that the Death Star consumed enough energy blowing up Alderaan to power the Sun for 7,000 years - more than the annihilation energy of the mass of the Death Star itself if it were made of any material we might see today. "Hypermatter" is obviously unbelievably powerful. It might be incredibly dense or it might be something so exotic and outside our experience that we can't even begin to guess at its properties.

Evidently they couldn't or didn't want to use hypermatter for the Starkiller. We don't know why. It might have been unsuitable, it might have been unavailable, or the First Order might not be able to build hypermatter reactors of sufficient size. Maybe they can't get enough hypermatter to run a superweapon and still power their fleet of Star Destroyers. It's never explained, and its better that they don't try.

As for the visibility and the effects, we don't have the foggiest idea why they're visible. The weapon obviously propagates FTL to strike its target - maybe it sends shock waves through hyperspace and those re-emerge, or "echo" or "shadow" or something along those lines in real-space, and that's why the Resistance can see it. There's really no way to know.

It is not that Star Wars isn't long on science, it's that A) the science of the Star Wars is not its focus; we see them using the tools but how they build them or improve them isn't what the story is about and B) the science it's about, in addition to being fanciful, is supposed to be the product of a civilization that's unimaginably advanced compared to ours.

When we see things that seem to "defy physics" in a movie like Star Wars, it's really not all that different from defying physics in Harry Potter. In one case, it's explicitly supernatural, in the other (leaving aside the fact that SW also has supernatural power-using people) its just that we can't understand it. We completely lack the understanding of physics that exists for people in Star Wars. It isn't that the writers or the directors need to be educated about physics; its that they have the luxury of not needing to worry about it. When we see a device, whether its a lightsaber or a Starkiller, from Star Wars, we can really only get an idea of what it does, not how it works. In some cases, a little quick bit of expository lines might be halpful - for example it'd be great if someone had said "it's a hyperspace shockwave" or something when the Resistance saw the effects in the sky - but it's often just as good that they don't and avoid the trap of making more serious errors by talking too much and being inconsistent at some point.

Another example is that, along with no longer having a power source, what happens to the planetary weapon once the sun it orbits is no longer present to provide gravity? It's very unlikely that the First Order simply ignored this problem or didn't think of it; it's far more likely that they had some solution to it, and we never heard of it because it really was pretty irrelevant to the Resistance and the movie characters; they HAD TO destroy it before the question of "how does it move around and what happens to it without solar gravity?" even becomes important.

As for the Resistance and the First Order and the Republic, it's not clear that the Republic has control of the entire galaxy as its predecessor or the Empire did. Once you've gotten rid of the regime, the hard work of rebuilding the place may prove complex and there may be issues with controlling all the territory and getting the everyday basics of government working - the present attempt at a government in Libya can fill you in on how that goes. We don't know exactly what terms Leia and the Resistance are on with the Republic - they might be proxies, there might be tension, issues of "plausible deniability" - it's very hard to say.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

The great thing about most science fiction is that it's generally based on science fact, and taken to an extreme. Inventions like light sabers and warp speed seem plausible given our current understandings of physics. Sure, you can make up a lot of maybes and what-if's to justify the stupidity of instantaneous light shows throughout the galaxy and how it breaks the universal constant of propagation...

Or you can just admit that JJ doesn't understand it. It's okay. He's a movie director, not a physicist.

He just thought it looked cool.

The biggest problem is people treating this like it's actually science fiction. It's not. It's fantasy, set in space.

Sci-Fi attempts to show their tech is believable and that the technology has evolved and continues to evolve. "Plausible" is what what Sci-Fi attempts to achieve.

Fantasy doesn't attempt to explain it's tech. Fantasy doesn't show their tech as evolved or evolving. Elrond & Co. fought Sauron with bows and swords. And then many thousands of years later he fought him again with.... bows and swords. "Magic" just exists and we accept it without question. We don't question about how boring life would have been for the all the people who lit the signal fires on top of the mountains in LOTR, or that for hundreds and hundreds of years, not a single person in any of those generations decided to say "**** it. I'm not going to work ever again. I won't be missed."

Star Wars shares far more in common with the latter. But because it has space ships and lasers, it always gets lumped into the former category.

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Les Zombis et les Loups-Garous!

No no no.... The problems with Abrams have nothing to do with fantasy vs. Sci Fi. Lord of the rings may be about magic, but it doesn't make horses supersonic or have hobbits lift mountains or make rivers float through the sky.

Consistency is important. Star wars tech can do anything, which is why i'm far more forgiving of the ridiculous excess end engineering impossibility that is Starkiller base (or the death stars, for that matter) than I am off the sudden changes in basic natural laws of physics that are not technologically related at all, such as the ability to see interstellar events in the sky in real time looking bigger than a moon despite being at least hundreds of trillions of miles away. No amount of tech wizardry fixes this. You can explain away the other crap (although a little explanation that Starkiller base had a hyperdrive would be nice), but not that.

Then again, Lucas used the word parsecs as a unit of time back in 1977 - a movie can survive one or two moments like this, especially when they have no real bearing on the plot. This is only a frustration, not a movie destroying gaffe. But don't minimize them, either. The problem with stuff like this is they cause anyone with even a child's understanding of physics to be jarred out of their willing suspension of disbelief. (in not exaggerating. This is all stuff I learned at age eight in a national geographic children's book called "Picture Atlas of Our Universe.") It's okay if Neo falls 50 stories and survives in the matrix... We know the rules of physics can be bent inside the matrix/construct. Plus they turned the pavement into a trampoline. But if Hans Gruber showed up for revenge in Die Hard 2 after surviving his 30 story fall from Nakatomi Plaza, I'd call bollocks. Which is what happened to me when Starkiller base fired; while watching the fancy special effects and dramatic destruction of a planet full of people - Abram's approach of "damn the laws of physics, make it look cool!" is counter-productive, because instead of thinking, "Woah, that's cool," I'm sitting on my seat in the theater, shaking my head and saying "No way. Bollocks. That's pure bollocks." instead of continuing to enjoy the movie for a couple minutes.

_________________
Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Finally saw this myself. It was a fun movie to watch. If this had been the first Star Wars movie, it would have been a fine start to the series. The series never would have taken off like it did, but that's okay.

In a nutshell, I just rewatched A New Hope with a bonus exciting lightsaber fight where Luke defeats Vader.

The title scroll does a good job of setting up the action, but it does an absolutely craptastic job at explaining the setting. Why is there a Resistance if there is a Republic backing them? I'm told there's an answer to this question, but it's not contained anywhere within The Force Awakens.

I liked the homage to Anakin Skywalker's original name in Lucas' draft script. Other than that, Starkiller Base was kind of dumb. It makes some kind of sense to have a bigger Death Star 40 years later, but this is ridiculous. The Republic, then the Rebel Alliance, destroyed two Death Stars. Didn't it occur to them that someone might build a third? I also have the same science-related issues that other people raised. Star Wars has always violated laws of physics, but it did acknowledge that they existed. The Death Star had to be moved into range of its target. Obi-Wan Kenobi didn't see Alderaan explode, he felt it through the Force.



This, like the recent Star Trek movies, appears to have focused more on fan service and callbacks than having a coherent plot. J.J. Abrams was a poor choice of director.

I do not expect that Disney should be beholden to the entire expanded universe, and I was glad to see they explicitly mothballed it. Some EU stories were better than others, some were complete crap, and overall each new story seemed to be an arms race to who could build up the biggest doomsday threat to the Galaxy, whether it be a superweapon or an attacking alien race from elsewhere in space. I do expect that Disney should be beholden to the six movies that came before. I'm sure all of them watched Star Wars. Kylo Ren, Finn, and Rey were all struck by a lightsaber, some multiple times. Each of them possessed all of their limbs by the end of the movie. Lightsabers do not work that way. We see them effortlessly cutting through various space age metals for six movies.

Seeing Anakin's lightsaber is no worse than cloning Luke via his severed hand and arming the clone with the saber. I understand the desire to have an object of significance, and Anakin Skywalker's lightsaber is the closest thing to a relic that the Star Wars setting has.

Rey has no Jedi training. I think that lightsaber fight is based entirely on appealing to modern feminists and their push to have more strong female protagonists. Now, Star Wars is not a setting where heroines are lacking. In the opening scene, Leia is shooting at the stormtroopers sent to capture her. The EU has several female Jedi, and dumping all of those stories means that Rey probably should be a girl because we've just gotten rid of Mara Jade, Bastila Shan, the Jedi Exile, Jaina Solo, and so forth. However, Luke Skywalker gets his *** handed to him by Darth Vader after training with Obi-Wan Kenobi and Yoda. There is absolutely no reason Rey should be able to defeat Kylo Ren that does not involve Kylo Ren being a pathetic antagonist. As Han Solo says to Fin, the Force doesn't work that way. There is a literary term for Rey. It's called, "Mary Sue."

I will be surprised if Finn doesn't turn out to be Force sensitive by the end of this current series.

It strains credulity that the big badass Sith warrior gets shot by blaster fire. However, after reviewing the math, kill Han Solo = get shot by Chewbacca holds up under all scrutiny. His ensuing wookie rampage through the First Order base was glorious.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

I didn't quite understand Fin's importance to the story. He seemed more of a plot device to me than a character that added significantly to the *ahem* diversity of the team. He didn't really display leadership potential. He didn't really seem to possess special skills other than some knowledge of the First Order. I don't really remember him balancing out any other characters' inadequacies. His character developed, but it didn't seem to develop into something I felt story will need. He did very well for his part, I'm just having a hard time understanding his importance.

Anybody mind helping me understand why Fin matters?

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The Dude abides.

Agreed. A perfect example of this:

"The Force is strong with some people."

Really? Um, ok.

vs.

"Midi-chlorians are microscopic, intelligent lifeforms that live within the cells of all living beings. The Force spoke through the midi-chlorians, allowing certain beings to use the Force if they were sensitive enough to its powers. Midi-chlorian counts, used to determine a being's potential in the Force, could be tested by examining a subject's blood. The highest known midi-chlorian count—over 20,000—belonged to Anakin Skywalker, the Chosen One who was believed to have been conceived by the midi-chlorians." (starwars.wikia.com)

Please stop talking.

Only because Rey had none.

I suspect he will matter more coming up, plus he provided a logical reason for Poe to escape and someone for Rey to interact with besides a droid the audience can't understand.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

He's the Everyman. We're experiencing a lot of the film through him, more or less.

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When he's underwater does he get wet? Or does the water get him instead?

Why is it ok for Luke to have latent abilities that let him implausibly accomplish great things in a short period of time, but Rey is just a Mary Sue? (i.e., why can't she also follow the classic Hero Cycle?) We also do not know her backstory, but it appears that she *has* had training in the past. She has also had to survive on her own for some time, so she has picked up skills like street fighting and repairing machinery out of necessity. (Because if she couldn't ID and dismantle equipment quickly and well, she couldn't eat.)

Luke's training with Obi-Wan was minimal (we were there for most of their time together), he didn't have much time with Yoda in TESB (based on the timelines of what was going on with Han/Leia), and the only real question is how long he trained with Yoda between TESB and RotJ.

Also, Kylo Ren wasn't really giving it his all due to his wounding and the fact that he was told to bring Rey to Snoke. I'm guessing that meant alive.

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When he's underwater does he get wet? Or does the water get him instead?

To my knowledge, nobody else in previous Star Wars material (including all of the disavowed Star Wars Extended Universe) -- not even Luke Skywalker, himself -- demonstrated such a rapid untrained proficiency with the Force. This isn't about the classic Hero Cycle, this is about internal consistency, which leads to your much more salient second point...



Exactly. It is obvious that Rey is already trained in using the Force, whether or not she remembers that training. This is further obvious in her deliberately mysterious background that still needs explaining. Rey is not a savant, she's experienced. We just don't know how she became so.



Luke's training with Obi-Wan was highly limited, for the few days travel between Tattooine and Alderaan. But he only used it to do exactly two things: (1) enhance his targeting skills (Death Star) - even then under Obi-Wan's direct supervision, and (2) manage to telekinetically pull a very small object a couple feet into his hand with several minutes of concentration.

Luke's training with Yoda lasted weeks, perhaps months (the flight from the Hoth system to Bespin was done without the primary hyperdrive, which would have taken days even if it were operational.)

Luke did not visit Yoda in between TESB and RotJ.

_________________
Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Yeah, I too always think he did, but in rewatching prior to seeing TFA, it's clear he said goodbye to Yoda in Empire and didn't return until his trip in Jedi.

You're right. For some reason I was thinking he had gone to Tatooine from there, but it was the other way around.

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When he's underwater does he get wet? Or does the water get him instead?

It's clear he did train, though. He was substantially more powerful in ROTJ than TESB.

Indeed. Not only does the audience clearly see an improved level of confidence and power, but Vader does, too, and comments on it a few times.

It's off-screen, but necessitated by events of the movies -- but he also goes *somewhere* (legends canon says Obi-Wan's hut) and finds at least some instructional material in order to study and learn how to build a lightsaber. It's not a stretch at all to suggest that lightsaber schematics/instructional videos weren't the only thing he found.

_________________
"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

And I'm not sure how much time passed between the two. I probably knew at one time, and totally forgot.

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When he's underwater does he get wet? Or does the water get him instead?