Star Wars : Into Spoilers - The Spoiler awakens.

[Tannhauser]

A whole lot of wrong.

So much baggage.

My eyes glazed over.

[HaemishM]

The Secret Formula for ultrapowerful Jedi is lots and lots of sand in their early diet.

It's the spice.

[Phildo]

My one niggling complaint is that even though I enjoyed Finn's character, and his chemistry with the other actors, at no point did he come across as someone raised from a young age to be a Stormtrooper.

Oh yeah, he definitely had too much personality.  Maybe his force ability will manifest via *jokes*

[jgsugden]

Syfy has an article up about an early draft of the script that had Luke as a major character... http://www.blastr.com/2015-12-21/star-wars-force-awakens-screenwriter-reveals-films-original-plot  I agree with the logic that you just couldn't have Luke play a major role in this script if you wanted us to give a darn about new characters.

My biggest complaint is the pacing.  Why have characters meet and go on a grand adventure over a few days - so that when one dies, they really have no reason to be quite so attached?  It felt like the movie was a bottle of Red Wine that was shotgunned right after someone popped the cork.

My thoughts on the characters:

Poe: Original script was going to kill him off where it looks like he died.  I think I'd have been fine with that path.  He is just an extra distraction in the later half of the film.  If he plays into the future movies, I hope he has a real place in the story.

Finn: Not sold on him.  He reminds me of that spazz that says whatever lies he thinks will help him get out of trouble.  As he seems Force Sensitive, I am wondering if there is any chance he turns out to be a Windu....  I didn't feel like his character had much of a progression in the movie.  He just sort of did stuff and I didn't feel a reason why it was based upon fear at first, and then on loyalty later.  Why be brave and loyal later in the movie when he was only out for himself earlier..?

Rey: Love the actress.  Love the acting.  Like the idea.  Don't love the script she had to perform.  I agree with all of the comments that she took to the Force too quickly.  We either needed some subtle hints there was a reason she was so good so quick, or she needed to struggle and not show any mastery.  I could see having her win while using the Force as a blunt weapon as well, but having her find her inner peace and be a master swordsman without giving an explanation as to why she was able to do so does contradict the past stories we've seen.  Also, her character should not have been as phrenetic as she was.  JJ's tone was wrong for her.  Her quick mastery of the force would have made more sense if she was more purposeful earlier in the film and less random - more eye of the storm, less crazy teen.

BB-8: Like the idea in theory, but I spent every moment he was on screen wondering how he is supposed to go back up the stairs, is the head detachable, why design him to be a ball when we've never seen ball shapes before, etc...  I'd also have liked to have seen less of an R2 personality.

Ren/Ben: I get him being a tool.  He has been fooled into "following his grandfather's footsteps" even though Vader left the path of the Sith in the end.  We see him give into anger far more easily than any Sith we've seen before (which was kind of refreshing).  I don't think he is a powerful Sith Lord relative to Vader, Sidious, etc...  and he lacks control.  However, he reminded me too much of the character he plays on Girls.  I'm betting that he'll sacrifice himself in the 8th movie in order to bring back Vader (resurrection is part of the new Star Wars thanks to Clone Wars - and there was too much Vader worship for there not to be a payoff), but the Vader he brings back will not be the Sith he'd have expected.

Han Solo: Ford got his wish, but I was disappointed.  Solo was always a bit of a good hearted moron - and in the end he died like one.  I knew what was going to happen, but I feel like even if I didn't, and I was in Han's shoes, I'd realize my son was going to kill me any second there.  I like the nice touch of Han saying he can always talk his way out of tough spots earlier in the film only to have him talk himself into being killed by his son, but it just didn't sit right.  And we are assuming that he is dead - right?  He falls off screen which is a time proven hedge to allow you to bring a character back, but I am pretty sure that he is not returning.

Leia: Kind of wasted here - I hope she gets to do more in the next one.  A slower pace would have allowed her and Han some time together. 

Snoke: He just has to end up being a yoda sized character when we see him in "real life" instead of as a hologram, right?  Or smaller?  Maybe a few inches tall?  A tiny force master could be interesting...

[Abagadro]

Maybe midichlorians are just sand fleas.

[Surlyboi]

The Secret Formula for ultrapowerful Jedi is lots and lots of sand in their early diet.

It's the spice.

Considering the Jedi this time is a white girl, it's pumpkin spice.

[Merusk]

Leia: Kind of wasted here - I hope she gets to do more in the next one.  A slower pace would have allowed her and Han some time together.  

Apparently Carrie Fisher has some health issues that limit her mobility and kill her memory. First I'd heard about it was in another site's thread but I haven't been able to find much to back this up. If it's the case, I don't think we're going to see much more of her.

[Lakov_Sanite]

I just don't get why people don't see Finn the way I do. Yes his emotions and excitement is dialed up to 10 but he's been living as a child soldier his entire life and what one can imagine to be a joyless, mostly emotionless experience. Imagine being able to taste food for the first time, see the sun for the first time. Yes they don't come and spell it out but it seemed pretty damn obvious to me, this is a young man being able to openly express emotions such as joy, anger,fear,excitement,lust    all for the first time.

[MediumHigh]

Maybe except he breaks all tension, which kinda sucks the air out the movie. But I do like how he feeds the comedy for the rest of the cast.

[Khaldun]

Read Fisher's memoir Wishful Drinking to get some sense of it. She still receives electroconvulsive therapy today I think--for some time she was getting doses of it every 6-7 weeks.

[Evildrider]

Yeah, isn't she like super bi-polar?

[Merusk]

Yeah, diagnosed shortly before or after she first did ANH. She did coke to self-medicate  which also gave her a hell of a bikini body. You may have seen pics. 

Yeah, just read some stuff on the ECT, it does all kinds of bad things to you. Sad.

I just don't get why people don't see Finn the way I do. Yes his emotions and excitement is dialed up to 10 but he's been living as a child soldier his entire life and what one can imagine to be a joyless, mostly emotionless experience. Imagine being able to taste food for the first time, see the sun for the first time. Yes they don't come and spell it out but it seemed pretty damn obvious to me, this is a young man being able to openly express emotions such as joy, anger,fear,excitement,lust    all for the first time.

Yeah that's my read of the character, too. Think of kids in oppressive households and how fuck-wild they go once they hit college.

[Ghambit]

I will accept Rey being Luke's daughter only if Finn is Windu's lost son (Finn has Sammy J's intensity).  Then the two of them bone in epi. 8 and she bears the ultimate Jedi-Sith.  Because bi-racial kids are not only confused, but they clearly are superior beings.   

Anyways, I'm gonna take a stab and guess that the guy touching the R2 unit in Rey's vision is also Windu.  Windu lost his right arm to Anakin and likely got a prosthetic.  The arm in the vision doesn't look like Luke's, it looks like someone else's.  So maybe it's Windu's and Windu survived the fall, as has been speculated.  Technically, Windu would have been the most powerful Jedi alive at the time with Yoda having passed.

Windu was then the one tasked with taking care of Rey during Luke's forays, but has to leave himself after the fall of Ren.  You will find them both chillin on the ocean planet drinking Midichlorian martinis.

[angry.bob]

Yes his emotions and excitement is dialed up to 10 but he's been living as a child soldier his entire life and what one can imagine to be a joyless, mostly emotionless experience. Imagine being able to taste food for the first time, see the sun for the first time. Yes they don't come and spell it out but it seemed pretty damn obvious to me, this is a young man being able to openly express emotions such as joy, anger,fear,excitement,lust    all for the first time.

That's not how PTSD and the many other fucked up things in trauma survivors manifest. Acute or chronic. If that's the angle they were trying for, they fucked it up hard.

[Fabricated]

I just saw it.

Rey sucks and the sort of people freaking out about people rightly criticizing her sucking are all you need to know about why she sucks.

[01101010]

If it does come to pass that Ren saved her when the knights ripped through the jedi school, then it might fit with Rey knowing a little more about the force than first appearances. She might not have realized it as a little kid and forgot all about it after the trauma of being dropped off on sand world #357.

[Pennilenko]

 

[Fabricated]

The movie however is very good. I liked it!

My suggestions:

-Kill Rey or make her far less Jesus Mary Sue and reduce her role in the movie
-Make Fynn the focus of the next movie because he was really super good
-Leia is a better female character than Rey and even if she has health problems I would like to see more of her
-Maybe more actual character arc stuff instead of just leaving it to the next movie

[Venkman]

So, what, we're up to 3 people who didn't like it? 

[Merusk]

No wonder it's gonna fail. It's the new Phantom Menace! Run away! 

[Lakov_Sanite]

You want to know bullshit? Ep5 Vader literally brings up a video screen and force chokes to death someone from the other end of a star destroyer.  Rey shouldn't and isn't on Vader's level but fuck man, they have been doing force related deus ex bullshit since ESB.

[Fabricated]

So, what, we're up to 3 people who didn't like it? 

I liked the movie. Rey is just kinda bad.

[Abagadro]

She was Exposition Girl in a reboot through most of the thing, which is a pretty thankless task. Hopefully Rian Johnson can bring a bit more style to the entire thing in the next one.

[Surlyboi]

The most coherent bitch I've heard about Rey is that she's a Mary Sue. So fucking what? So was Anakin. He was also a whiny bitch.

Every other complaint I've seen about Rey has been of the type leveled against Furiosa in Mad Max and fuck anybody and everybody in that camp.

[Fabricated]

Rey wasn't very good. Saying that Anakin was a Sue too isn't actually a very good argument because 1) the prequels were insanely bad and 2) Anakin actually gets his ass kicked good a couple times in the series.

If Rey was a dude, he'd still not be very good. Rey the character is not very good.

[Ghambit]

I am in agreement that Rey was not very good.  I won't say bad and I dug Ridley's Keira Knightly vibe, but beyond that I'm with Fab... she was a fairly bland character.  Kind of a young, female Anakin really.  I will give her that the script didn't really help, but the script didn't really help the actors in ep. 4-6 either... and they made it work with just flat out awesome acting and improv.  Ridley phoned it in in this regard.  

To be fair, Ridley is nowhere near the skill level of Boyega.  There's a reason he's the only black guy in the film; he's just a really really damned good actor.  You could tell he was moving beyond the lines, similar to how Ford approaches his craft.

In the next film hopefully she grows into the role and/or maybe receives some more direction or more forceful writing.  Akin to what happened with Hamil's Luke in ESB.  That said, if she was channeling Hamil's ep4 Luke, she didn't do a very good job with that either... but I'll blame that on the direction of her character as she's clearly going to be more of a grey Jedi.

[Lakov_Sanite]

Seems relevant ...

http://io9.gizmodo.com/please-stop-spreading-this-nonsense-that-rey-from-star-1749134275?utm_campaign=socialflow_jezebel_facebook&utm_source=jezebel_facebook&utm_medium=socialflow

[pxib]

I saw the film in a half-empty theater at the 10:30am matinee. I liked it the same way I liked the first JJ Star Trek film, and it was a lot better than that one.

But yes, let's talk about Rey: I liked that she was as good as Han Solo at diagnosing what was wrong with his ship.

She'd been trading pieces of engines and power couplings for food for functionally her entire living memory. Smugglers and traders visited regularly so she'd been working with ships, and the Falcon itself had been there for long enough that she had opinions about its various owners modifications. Repairing things, fighting with her stick, survival in the desert, alien languages, piloting a speeder, and crawling around giant spacecraft: All skills that, within the first ten minutes of introduction of the character, I felt the movie had sufficiently cued that she had earned.

When Han Solo offers her a job after knowing her for a couple of days, it was not a Mary Sue moment. Rey was genuinely the sort of person Han should probably hire. When she's flying off in the Falcon with Chewbacca at the end, that's perfectly acceptable. I can see her becoming a hell of a smuggler in some other movie. She certainly knows how to take his sort of insane, borderline unnecessary risks.

I could not accept her as a better Jedi than Ben after a few minutes of watching him use force powers.

Like Finn (has anybody else commented on how his name is a THX1138 reference?), she thought the Jedi were a myth. Later, after a few seconds of practice, she mind tricks a storm trooper. Then she force-pulls the saber better than Ben. Then she beats him in a duel.

Remember when Anakin accidentally defeated all the robots by accidentally destroying their central brain by accidentally flying into their base after accidentally getting locked in a fighter? Because the midichlorians, I guess? This was better than that, but it has the same basic problem. The movie needed to give us some background (A few minutes even! Luke in the Falcon with the drone in E4!) where we have some sort of explanation for how that's something she can do. Either that or she needs to be as shocked and disoriented as we are (like she was after deftly piloting the Falcon through the skeleton of a Star Destroyer).

Yeah we've all seen Obi-wan do the mind trick on Storm Troopers... WHEN DID SHE? "The Force awakened!" "The saber called to her!" These are Mary Sue bullshit. How did she earn that, movie? I'm sure it will all be explained when we can read her inner monologue in the upcoming novelization, but I would have liked to see some of it on screen.

Show, don't tell.

Gosh was it a fun time at the cinema, though!

"Yeah, but why are you rescuing me?"
"Because it's the right thing to do."
(beat)
"You need a pilot."
"I need a pilot."

Star Wars!

[Surlyboi]

The novelization is out and it doesn't cover that.

Someone on my Facebook feed came up with a decent fanwank that I'm willing to go with for the time being: She learned kind of by osmosis. She's a fairly skilled staff fighter and she has a force-aided knack for improvisation. That helped her focus and adapt Ren's style. Also, Ren was beat to shit by the time they started fighting anyway and, let's face it, he's a shitty jedi. His whole motivation for going dark was that he was a shitty jedi. Look at his Fisher Price fucking lightsaber fer chrissake. You think that fuzzy, frizzle effect was because it looked cool or menacing? Hell no, it's because he can't make a full-fledged saber. That's one of the reasons he wanted Luke/Anakin's so bad.

[jakonovski]

A cool way would've been to show Rey covertly using the Force to survive on Jakku. And wondering to herself why she's the only one that can do it.

[Teleku]

-Kill Rey or make her far less Jesus Mary Sue and reduce her role in the movie

Heh, when she gets knocked out and Finn picks up the light saber, at first I thought "Yes!  They were building her up to be Super Jedi Jesus, but it was just a misdirect for the other more humble less of a bland dick character to be the jedi protagonist!  That's actually pretty cool and original!"

Alas.   

Seems relevant ...

http://io9.gizmodo.com/please-stop-spreading-this-nonsense-that-rey-from-star-1749134275?utm_campaign=socialflow_jezebel_facebook&utm_source=jezebel_facebook&utm_medium=socialflow

I have never ever seen the term 'Mary Sue' used in a way that implied it was only for female characters.  It's used constantly to refer to any protagonist that is overpowered/naturally good at everything in Fantasy and Sci-fi literature,  which is mostly men.  So the author is already talking out of their ass from the get go.

[Riggswolfe]

I have never ever seen the term 'Mary Sue' used in a way that implied it was only for female characters.  It's used constantly to refer to any protagonist that is overpowered/naturally good at everything in Fantasy and Sci-fi literature,  which is mostly men.  So the author is already talking out of their ass from the get go.

The big thing the author is right on is that a Mary Sue arises out of fan fiction and is much, much more "awesome' than Rey is presented as being. Rey is far from it and as for her learning the Force "too fast" it didn't bother me at all. It seemed to me she was acting purely on instinct and it was also nicely used to subvert the "helpless woman gets captured and needs rescuing" trope.

Also, her beating Ren in the final duel:

1) He'd been shot by Chewie
2) He was visibly bleeding from said wound.
3) He just fought Finn who wounded him again.
4) When the duel with Rey begins he is visibly exhausted. At the START of the duel.

[Merusk]

Yeah, the author outlines the real origin and history of "Mary sue" characters.

I like the "Force Osmosis" theory put forward in the article. Seems in tune with the duality of The Force and the strike me down bit in a way Abans would twist them. I've just figured she had training prior to being dropped off and had been told post that it was all kids games and shed forgotten the same way we forget how our toys used to "talk" to us as we grew up.

[MediumHigh]

I can see you reaching. Knowing how to fly in the star wars universe has been literally beat over our heads how easy it is. Farm boy luke can blow up the death star and avoid being shot down by Vader. Slave Anakin can destroy an entire droid army with only relevent skills being super humanly good at pod racing. Reys a scavenger of ship parts and probably picked up flying like the way teenagers kinda know how to drive, maybe, who cares the shits easy. In fact Finn not knowing how to fly is a bit more absurd.

You know whats not easier then flying the millennial falcon? Being a motherfucking jedi. And you guys just shrugging your shoulders like "whelp it was like osmosis" or something. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug.

[Tannhauser]

How much training did Luke get in the Force between Farmboy/Hero of the Rebellion?  Right, an orbiting little training droid and sage words from Ben.  And Luke and Rey were not Jedi yet.  Look at ESB; Luke spends most of the movie training and goes up against Vader.  What does Vader say? "You are not a Jedi, yet."  And kicks Lukes ass without breaking a sweat.  They have established that you can pick up Force powers and go and do pretty good, but to be a Jedi requires training. 

Luke blew up the Death Star while evading Vader.  Cool.
Rey defeats a wounded, exhausted and mediocre wannabe.  Unrealistic!  Mary Sue!

Please.