SW - Episode 7: Mary Sue wakes up but there's no coffee. RAGE.

[shiznitz]

At the beginning of November I told my youngest son (10) that if brought home 20 100s from school - quizzes, tests or homework - then we go see this as a family on opening night. I knew he would do it so I bough the tickets almost the same day, but he did actually do it and we are all going.

[Lucas]

Saw it!!

Now this was a great Star Wars movie 

All in all, yes, a rehash of situations we have already seen in the first trilogy (but IMO this was a deliberate decision by JJ, not just a matter of lack of imagination), but oh so entertaining. There is quite a few more things to say about it (I guess we'll have time  ), but this one made me forget the prequels in a instant.

[jgsugden]

...
Oh, and Finn is Luke Skywalker's son.  Conceived by midichlorians, turns out.

Those little sluts.

[Riggswolfe]

...
Oh, and Finn is Luke Skywalker's son.  Conceived by midichlorians, turns out.

Those little sluts.

For like 1/100000th of a second I was like "That son of a bitch!" then I was like "oh yeah, no WAY JJ is putting midichlorians in this movie!"

[jgsugden]

Did they ever resolve whether midichlorians were STDs?  Many other microscopic bugs transmitted by force are...

[Velorath]

Saw it!!

Now this was a great Star Wars movie 

All in all, yes, a rehash of situations we have already seen in the first trilogy (but IMO this was a deliberate decision by JJ, not just a matter of lack of imagination), but oh so entertaining. There is quite a few more things to say about it (I guess we'll have time  ), but this one made me forget the prequels in a instant.

Saw it also, but I feel like I need a bit of distance from it (and to watch it at least one more time) to really figure out how I feel about it. For the moment there are things I really liked about it, and things that just completely did not work for me.

[Falconeer]

Just saw it.

I am not happy. And that's all I am gonna say.

Yes, what Velorath said. But all in all, I am not happy no.

[jgsugden]

Phantom Menace rage grew over time.  It started off strong and grew into a fervor, but it grew.  I'm starting to wonder if this is going to be a general, "We liked it, but..." that grows into "No, this is no better than Revenge of the Sith"...

[Lakov_Sanite]

I fully expect many star wars fans to hate it and I don't think that will have any bearing on my enjoyment.

[Velorath]

Phantom Menace rage grew over time.  It started off strong and grew into a fervor, but it grew.  I'm starting to wonder if this is going to be a general, "We liked it, but..." that grows into "No, this is no better than Revenge of the Sith"...

It's hard to properly judge a movie that carries so much baggage along with it, and the movie relies on that baggage so much it's impossible to ask if it's a good movie in its own right, Star Wars aside. There's also a lot of set up for the next movie and depending on where they go with it in VIII and IX, it could make this a better or worse movie.

One non-spoiler thing I will say is that I like that they use a lot of practical special effects, but some of the CG stuff they do I found really distracting. There are a couple characters in the movie that felt like they came straight of the Hobbit movie, which isn't surprising I guess given Serkis' involvement.

[jgsugden]

.... There are a couple characters in the movie that felt like they came straight of the Hobbit movie, which isn't surprising I guess given Serkis' involvement.

... but is a hugely damning thing to say, at least from my perspective.  The Hobbit (and parts of Phantom Menace) looked like a cartoon.  I was hoping we'd get away from that angle. 

[Velorath]

I think in some instances making some characters CG is just unavoidable unless they want every alien with a speaking part to be a human with makeup on. Puppets are great when they don't have to be very mobile, and don't talk or only talk in an alien language that doesn't require their face to be too expressive, but otherwise I understand why they have to use at least some CG. I'm just not fond of the look of the CG here and the character Serkis plays I don't think really needed to be CG at all.

[Falconeer]

I am just gonna say one thing:

GOLLUMORT.

Fuck that bullshit.

[Lucas]

Hahaha, yeah, infact that's one of the things I didn't like (although, personally, it doesn't lower my overall opinion of the movie; others will find it particularly bothersome, yep); I mean, what EXACTLY was that...and why??? (or, in italian, "cazz'era quel coso???" ). GollTrollMort indeed.

[Lakov_Sanite]

I can live with one bad cgi character.  did you see age of ultron? fuck, half the action sequences were all cgi humans/supers and it looked like trash.

[Lucas]

I can live with one bad cgi character.  did you see age of ultron? fuck, half the action sequences were all cgi humans/supers and it looked like trash.

Sure, but the attached name doesn't help it either; sounds like a character from "The Wire" rather than the SW universe :D

[Velorath]

I can live with one bad cgi character.  did you see age of ultron? fuck, half the action sequences were all cgi humans/supers and it looked like trash.

And I'd take Winter Soldier's action sequences over Age of Ultron's any day. I'll fully admit it's just a personal preference thing for me though and it's hard to articulate the difference to me between a good CG character (like Koba from the Planet of the Apes movies) and bad ones.

[Lakov_Sanite]

I can live with one bad cgi character.  did you see age of ultron? fuck, half the action sequences were all cgi humans/supers and it looked like trash.

And I'd take Winter Soldier's action sequences over Age of Ultron's any day. I'll fully admit it's just a personal preference thing for me though and it's hard to articulate the difference to me between a good CG character (like Koba from the Planet of the Apes movies) and bad ones.

Don't get me wrong, bad cgi is always terrible, I'm just not going to let it bother me if it's in small doses.  There's a big difference between one or two cgi pieces in a movie vs avengers:age of stretch armstrongs.

[Evildrider]

After watching Escape from LA again last night, it will have to be really really shitty CGI for me to be bothered by it.   

[angry.bob]

It's almost a fucking remake of Episode IV. It was a waste of a very limited resource, a theatrical Star Wars movie. Fucking JJ Abrams...

Also,

[Lakov_Sanite]

*looks at the people that didn't like movie* Man you guys stop, I'm already excited enough to see it. 

[Velorath]

I'm still on the fence as to how good of a movie I think it is. The CG thing is just a bit of a nitpick that can be talked about without getting into spoilers. There are a number of good things I can say about it also (and more bad things as well). I will say that overall, I liked the cast.

[Margalis]

All in all, yes, a rehash of situations we have already seen in the first trilogy (but IMO this was a deliberate decision by JJ, not just a matter of lack of imagination)

I'm sure I've said this before but I'll say it again: Star Wars is a callback-based franchise.

There's a reason why in the MMOS game you can choose to play as a Twilek dancer, a Boba-style bounter hunter, a Han-style smuggler. Why there is always an ice planet and a tree-filled Endor place, why the powers are always "force choke" and "force lightning." Doing that allows people to recreate the movies. Star Wars is not an interesting universe, an interesting plot or even really interesting characters - it's cool individual scenes, costuming, gadgets, etc.

There's not much meat there, so the basic formula relies on "hey, remember this cool scene in the original movies? Here's our take!" So now a guy has two lightsabers, or 6 lightsabers, or a lightsaber with 2 ends. It's similar to how every Indiana Jones movie has to have a scene where Indy has a gun and some other dude has a sword - it's unoriginal riffing on the original inspired scene.

All franchises suffer this to some degree but it's really bad in Star Wars, because again, the cool stuff is mostly superficial - a guy who wears all black and has a rad voice, lightsabers, wacky shaped spaceships, etc. So here's Darth Maul, who we hope will look as cool as Darth Vader did. That's something the movies need - a cool looking Darth dude. That's part of the Star Wars checklist.

That said I don't know what else you do because if you don't have a Jedi guy with a lightsaber, a cool Darth guy, etc, how is it even Star Wars? You can do a lot of stuff with Star Trek because the idea is pretty wide open and philosophical in nature, it's not mostly superficial trappings. "What if in this movie the phasers are purple and instead of shooting a straight beam they shoot a double helix?" is not the foundation for an entire scene, at best it's just a fun aside. Whereas in Star Wars a guy with a differently shaped lightsaber is a major concept. (At least two set pieces in the prequels are based just on that!)

Making something Star Warsy is taking a handful of iconic scenes, images and characters and trying to toe the line between replicating them and invoking them.

Some things are just not fit for an expanded universe or a long series of explorations and I think Star Wars is one of those. I'd say the same thing about something like Die Hard - love the first film but it's a one-off story, which is why Die Hard 2 is just "weirdly enough the exact same thing happens to the same guy on the same day - lol."

One non-spoiler thing I will say is that I like that they use a lot of practical special effects, but some of the CG stuff they do I found really distracting. There are a couple characters in the movie that felt like they came straight of the Hobbit movie, which isn't surprising I guess given Serkis' involvement.

I've come to view "we're using mostly practical effects" as a way to pay lip service that actually translates into "prepare for wacky CGI hijinks!" The guys making The Thing remake talked up the practical effects and that movie is a CGI shit fest.

Realistically speaking CGI is just too tempting for a big Hollywood film in terms of cost, ease of integration, degree of laziness it allows ,etc. To be a director on a major movie that eschews CGI effects you have to be an iconoclast with a lot of pull, which only describes a handful of people, and certainly not JJ Abrams. It's like Nolan shooting on film - a lot of directors will say they love film, but ultimately few of them will shoot with it, either because they don't really want to or because they aren't allowed to.

After watching Escape from LA again last night, it will have to be really really shitty CGI for me to be bothered by it.

Are you saying the surfing scene doesn't hold up?

[Falconeer]

I can live with one bad cgi character.  did you see age of ultron? fuck, half the action sequences were all cgi humans/supers and it looked like trash.

And I'd take Winter Soldier's action sequences over Age of Ultron's any day. I'll fully admit it's just a personal preference thing for me though and it's hard to articulate the difference to me between a good CG character (like Koba from the Planet of the Apes movies) and bad ones.

Don't get me wrong, bad cgi is always terrible, I'm just not going to let it bother me if it's in small doses.  There's a big difference between one or two cgi pieces in a movie vs avengers:age of stretch armstrongs.

To me it's not a matter of bad CGI. It's a matter of an ugly character who doesn't fit the role or the purpose and seems designed only to strike a chord with fans of another wildly famous IP. Very bad.

[Falconeer]

Also, I will add that there's many things I liked. And some I disliked (CGI is not one of them). The callback and the old stuff is super fine and some of the new stuff is very cool too. Sadly, after an amazing and genuinely exciting start, things begin to go bad after a while until they reach a point where they are not cool anymore and something has been majorly fucked up. Leaving a bad taste.

[Cyrrex]

I don't share your opinion in general, but it is true enough to say that the start was absolutely cracking, and some of the middle acts felt a bit more like filler.  Necessary filler probably, but definitely less exciting.  I thought it picked up again nicely towards the end, and ended appropriately.

In general, though, some of you are being unfair about the CGI effects.  Yes, there was some, but this was no green screen, CGI filled mess like the prequels.  It was a visual feast for the vast majority of the film.  The acting was uniformly solid - not great or anything, but also not the wooden, cringeworthy shit from the prequels.  The action was excellent.  When stormtroopers get shot and blown up, it looks like people in armor getting shot and blown up.  Shit looked real.  The sword-fighting looked real.  Or more real.

I will have to watch it again and again before I am sure where this one really fits in.  But on the whole, I think it compares closely to the OT, and is uniformly better than all the prequels.  JJ understands Star Wars better than Lucas did, even though that should be impossible.

[Falconeer]

I agree with you on almost everything. It's not a bad movie at all and yes fuck George Lucas post 1983. Good thing he gave Star Wars away if they had to do more of it.
But I still not like the last part of Force Awakens, it's so much weaker compared to the first half. Also as I already said CGI doesn't bother me, it's one character that bothers me and not for the technical aspects of it. And finally and most importantly there's one plot element that I am not and will never be OK with and I think it was a big no no and I think it ruined the movie to me in many ways and potentially the rest of the new trilogy.

[Cyrrex]

Dammit, we need a spoiler thread or something so that you could explain that more and then I could explain to you why you are wrong!   

[jgsugden]

We have spoiler tags.  Why not use them?

[01101010]

My spoiler button has been missing for quite awhile now, so I have to type it out like some filthy derelict.

[Cyrrex]

The spoiler tags for normal use are fine.  I don't think so in this case.  You'll have the next ten pages being unreadable bullshit for anyone who hasn't seen it yet.

[Ironwood]

Yeah, fuck that ;  go make a fucking thread.

[sickrubik]

Yup. I'd appreciate that. I clearly can't stop myself from checking this thread.

[Ginaz]

If you want to know everything scene by scene, it's all in the link below.

http://spoilerboard.blogspot.ca/2015/12/spoilerboard-v40-final-pre-release.html

[Teleku]

Just got back from seeing it. 



Liked it, but it had it's issues.  Somebody make the spoiler thread!