Official Star Wars: TFA Review Thread (SPOILERS!!!)

Snoke sucked. The only weak point in an otherwise almost flawless Star Wars movie. I'm very concerned that he may in fact be the Emperor, who somehow survived being tossed down the shaft by Vader.

The reveal of the Millennium Falcon is probably one of the greatest and funniest moments in SW history.

Also loved the scene where Han throws the pirate to his death at the oncoming creature. A real "fuck you" on the whole Greedo shot first nonsense.

Please stop spamming up the SW threads with your inane shit, @gturner .

I get the sense that Snoke is not who he seems. Definitely a Wizard of Oz vibe.

That was my immediate thought, too. I also loved the way he kept wanting to use Chewie's bowcaster.

Yeah, and you were obviously one who refused to believe Darth Vader was Luke's father. It's a fucked up family.

Going by that one theory, he must be Jar Jar Binks...

He may be Darth Plagueius. Apparently the music being played during one scene was the same as that played when Sidious discussed him in Revenge of the Sith.

Interesting. There is a (non-canon) novel about Darth Pelagious that indicates he is a member of the same species as the banking clan guy from Attack of the Clones. Snoke does have a similar look, so that seems possible. And of course, Pelagious can cheat death, so if it's him, they will have quite a difficult time taking him out.

Yes, it's a similar sounding male choir; though in Episode III this was music the characters where actually listening to in the opera house rather than it being the film's score.

Here's an article referencing that book, along with a few other reasons to speculate that Snoke might be Plagueis.

http://www.techtimes.com/articles/1...force-awakens-who-is-supreme-leader-snoke.htm

I hope he his Plagues. The few references we did get from the prequels were the best parts of the prequels. There were mentions of clones, the sith and Rey hearing Obiwan and Yoda was awesome. The Story Palpatine about Plagues was also pretty good. I think it would be a good way to tie it all together if Snoke was in fact Plagues. The scar on his head does look like it could be from a light saber and we know force lightening can also deform one's face. All the pieces are there, I guess it all depends on what JJ had in mind and maybe they wanted to see the fans reactions before setting it in stone. I'm all for it. It would make for a great narrative.

Anything that references the prequels is a non-starter in my books. Simply put, in my world the prequels never happened. TFA managed to wash the bad taste from my mouth and I'm never drinking from that fountain again.

I don't blame you.
By the way, I've got some kool-aid for you to try

The prequels are cannon, like it or not and they aren't all bad. In fact there are quite a few ideas that I thought were good. They just weren't executed well. I don't mind them using the good parts of the prequels in the sequels.

* canon

Dude, you beat me to it. I was looking for that avatar last night.

I was a little bit naughty in how I acquired it. Feel free to use it!

Here's a better one of him.

The reveal of the Millennium Falcon was fucking awesome! The theater cheered.

I thought the movie was excellent for 2 main reasons:
1. Brought back the nostalgia feeling we had from 1977 without being heavy handed about it.
2. Introduced the new characters in such a way that we liked them and cared about them enough to be okay with them taking over from the old ones.

Other things I liked.
Humor: the jokes flowed easily and weren't stupid campy shit. Even Threepio was funny by being the character (interrupting the Leia/Han reunion), not by uttering stupid one liners.
Villains: The story of Kylo Ren was still in progress in that he was still becoming a bad guy. It's kinda the story that Anakin should've had instead of being a whiny little bitch.
CGI: Was used to enhance sets and scenes rather than be be the whole thing. Things never felt too busy. I had watched Ep. III the night before and it almost gives you a headache, there's so much going on everywhere.

Looking forward to Eps 8 and 9!

Things I didn't like:

They didn't use the cut where, when Han Solo and Chewbacca finally stepped on board the Millenium Falcon, Han raised his hand-held communicator and said "Thanks OnStar. I'll take it from here."

This. How effortlessly Driver and the filmmakers pulled it off with Ren shows how much of a fuckup the prequels were.

It's almost like J.J.'s saying: "Here, George: this is the way you do 'young man seduced by the Dark Side and conflicted about it.'"

This is interesting.

GEORGE Lucas may have been the brains behind Star Wars, but it was his ex-wife Marcia Lucas who gave the film its heart.

Today, she has largely been erased from the history books.

Marcia, who won the 1977 Academy Award for Film Editing along with Richard Chew and Paul Hirsch for her work on Star Wars, was instrumental in shaping the film’s iconic moments that would propel it to the status of cultural phenomenon.

In his 2008 book,The Secret History of Star Wars, journalist Michael Kaminski dedicates an entire chapter to Marcia Lucas, nee Griffin, who was once described by biographer Dale Pollock as the director’s “secret weapon”.​

From reading it, the Star Wars George Lucas would have otherwise made would have sucked balls.

The article references "Deleted Magic". Part 1 of that here.

The original dialog for the carbonite scene in The Empire Strikes Back was:

Leia: "I love you."
Solo: "I love you too."

You can thank Harrison Ford for that change.

Apparently we can thank Marcia Lucas for most of the scenes that were great. George was going to have Obi Wan confront Darth and then just drop a blast door between them and run off back to the Falcon. As the Deleted Magic footage shows, left to his own judgement the movie would've been emotionally flat, just like the prequels where there was no real tension, no real resolution, and no real interest, just characters moving from one scene to the next spouting bad dialog. He wasn't even going to have the Death Star getting ready to fire on the Rebel base, and had Luke making multiple runs on the exhaust port.

So the one person who knew how a movie had to work emotionally left and was replaced by a bunch of mindless yes men who would worship his "genius". Watching the director's dialog on the prequels is enough to make any fan puke.

I remember. That made it into Alan Dean Foster's novelization. Two runs anyway.

Note, also in the movie there was supposed to be a huge gun tower at the end of the trench just beyond the exhaust port firing at the approaching rebel fighters. In the movie, Wedge refers to it and Luke responds IIRC. The novelization by Foster also mentions it

Yet it doesn't make it into the finished movie.

In "Deleted Magic" (which is in two parts) they point out a lot of the dialog in the movie that reflected the earlier forms that didn't get edited out, like calling out to Red Six after Red Six was dead, plus a line that refers to Luke's previous run through the trench. They had to do a lot of editing to turn the crappy rough cut into a good movie. They had to reshoot the cantina scene because the first attempt made it look like a lazy, half-empty pub in the middle of the afternoon.

First thoughts ...

Overall:

Star Wars is back. TFA found the heart that the original trilogy had, and that the prequels completely lost in their obsession with kewl special effects, juvenile antics and cheap sight gags. TFA has likable characters telling a compelling story, and that's what it should be about.

Characters:

I like that the characters are a little more well-rounded and interesting than their OT counterparts. Many of the OT characters were basically archetypes, and while that's part of what made them so iconic, you can't do Darth Vader again and have it work. The scavenger with a mysterious past, the stormtrooper who has a change of heart, the young villain who so desperately wants to be Vader but isn't -- these are all interesting people to watch.

Han and Leia were done very well. Han's initial reveal was one of the best moments in the movie. Even though it'd be nice to think that Han and Leia got married and lived happily ever after, the actual outcome feels very realistic given what they both went through. I also like that they didn't try to make them into action heroes. And the chemistry is still there.

The biggest question at the end is definitely "Who is Rey?" She knows too much to really be as unaware as she appears at the beginning. My first assumption that she's Han and Leia's daughter (and, OK, really I want them to be Jacen and Jaina from the Thrawn trilogy), followed by thinking that maybe she's Luke's daughter instead. In either case, it doesn't seem like she can be a Luke-style "raised on a backwater planet with no idea who she is" character ... she may have been under deep cover for a long time, but she knows what's going on. She's interesting and well-portrayed. Oh, and it's kinda cool that she finishes beating the crap out of the guys who are trying to steal BB-8 before Finn makes it there to rescue her.

Finn is another good character. Shades of Han Solo, but not so much as to seem derivative. The stormtrooper-turned-rebel idea isn't completely new -- at least one of the EU novels made stormtroopers into sympathetic characters rather than just faceless mooks -- but he's still interesting. And both he and Rey are flawed enough to avoid venturing into Mary Sue/Gary Stu territory.

I almost forgot about Poe, to the point where people were talking about the "new trio" earlier in the thread, I couldn't figure out who the third member was. Hopefully he gets more to do in the next two movies.

Plot:

OK, some of this is a little wacky. Why is there a map to where Luke is? Who made it? Why? How did part of it end up randomly in the possession of some guy on Jakku? It'd be nice if that part made a little more sense.

Little touches:

There's juuuuuust enough fanservice to be fun without being cringe-inducing.

... so overall, a good movie, and as close to the spirit of the original as it's possible to be. Chances are no sequel could ever quite capture what made the original trilogy such a phenomenon, but as a new story for a new generation, TFA does its job well.

In the book Poe is a bit more developed because it covers him waking up and wandering for a long time until a trader comes buy on a vehicle. The trader thinks Poe is crazy but picks him up. They get attacked by some scavengers on the road and Poe says "let me drive!" Problem solved, the trader takes him to see somebody who can help him get off the planet. It wouldn't surprise me if that part of the story was shot and then cut.

About the only other difference I recall is that the book goes into a bit more detail about how badly Rey despises the guy who trade the food portions for ship parts.

And at the end when Rey finds Luke:

"My mind is full of questions."
"There are answers you would never believe."
"Like how much they're paying you for one scene with no dialog? Come on. Your a fucking voice actor! Say something!"
"Okay. A rancor ate my script. Ka-ching!"