You raise some interesting points, but I don't have a lot of time to address all of them sufficient detail today, so I will just stick with a couple that I thought were valid.

The whole 'everyone can see the destruction the destruction of the new Republic and the Hosnian system. I thought this was bad science. It made no sense at all. Maybe I just don't know enough about the star wars galaxy, but to me it looked like the montage as it was being blown up, was trying to show people from vastly different sections seeing it in their night sky both as the same size and at the same time. Maybe the galaxy in star wars is smaller than I thought, or maybe they have some weird explanation for it, but it seemed like a huge stretch. It definitely was noticeable when it happened. I think it might have been more impactful to just have one nearby plenet witness it in the sky, or have it conveyed to others through the force. Either way, it was odd. But it is also happening in a world where space ships abide by the physics of terrestrial craft, fixing a hyper drive takes some elbow grease and a wrench (really no different than changing a tire), and there is sound in space. It just isn't a franchise I expect much science from. It if were another sequel to 2001, my bar would be much higher. But for Star Wars, I really don't expect much, and I do understand that they did that for emotional impact (still think it is dumb, but I get why it was done).

I think some of your other points are valid, but I frankly feel you are giving the original star wars way too much of a pass on the same believability and flow issues. I really am having trouble seeing how the problems in Force Awakens are all that different from the first trilogy (the things I listed, I don't consider minor at all).

Quote from: Skarg;873619I'd be really curious to hear what you think TFA's holes add to the film. I tend to agree with Spike that most of them could have been easily patched with a very small amount of attention or change to the overall story, which is also partly why they feel so galling.
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If you list two or three holes (aside from the one I address in the other post) I'd be happy to give my take. In most instances I just think patches would have disrupted the flow they were going for. Each patch on its own might not seem like much, but you add that up over an entire film and I think it would have a big impact.

So. I saw the film a week or two ago and only just noticed this thread. For my part, I thought it was a lot of flashy set pieces that didn't hang together very well. I don't feel any need to see it again, but I can't muster enough energy to hate it.

From an RPG perspective, the film felt like a Star Wars game being run by a GM for his girlfriend (just because the protagonist is female): basically, Rey has the same adventure as a New Hope, while being the best fighter, jedi, pilot, mechanic, and scout in the galaxy, who everybody immediately loves.

If only there was a term for that.  

(Still, nice seeing a competent female protagonist, don't get me wrong.)

Quote from: Majus;873708From an RPG perspective, the film felt like a Star Wars game being run by a GM for his girlfriend (just because the protagonist is female): basically, Rey has the same adventure as a New Hope, while being the best fighter, jedi, pilot, mechanic, and scout in the galaxy, who everybody immediately loves.

If only there was a term for that.  

I'm not a fan of the movie but I really had no issues with Rey... and I sure didn't get a Mary Sue vibe off of her... at least, no more than I get off of most Hollywood action heroes nowadays.

Nice to see this thread has been humming right along in my absence.

I had a thought last night, while my computer was dead, and I'm about to try and recreate it now.  I, and others, have commented on the sparsity of plot in TFA. I'd like to expand that shorthand criticism, to explain in some writerly-crafty sort of way where TFA goes off the rails.

What, exactly, is the plot of The Force Awakens?

Well, that's actually pretty simple. The Plot is 'Find Luke Skywalker'.  

Is it a good plot? Eh... look, most plots are pretty banal when stripped to the essence. Its the TRIP that people are after, right? The infamous 'plot arc' with its rising and falling action, which most people have probably seen diagrammed like a backwards rock of Gibraltar, or summach.

And does TFA have a neatly diagrammed plot arc with rising and falling action, with little dips and peaks along the way?

Better than the Expendables!   Maybe too many peaks along the way, but it surely does have rising action.

So, clearly, my complaint about a 'lack of plot' is invalid.  

Whoa! I say Whoa! Not so fast, cowboy.

Who are are main characters here? Finn and Rey.  

What is Finn's reason for finding Luke Skywalker?

He doesn't have one. Doesn't care, not interested in the least... he really just wants to get away from The New Order.  

So Rey then? Rey is Luke's Daughter, right?

Well, the movie doesn't definitively answer that, especially not for Rey.  Rey, according to everything we know about her... wants to stay on Tatooine and wait for her family to come home. She wants that more, even, than her secondary motivation of 'wanting to belong to a family'.  At every turn she insists on returning to Tatooine, and the pesky plot keeps interfering.

What about BB8 (or however they're writing it...)?

Nah. He's merely carrying the mcguffin map. He wants to get back to Poe and the Revolution.  

So, that leaves us with a couple of minor characters and the villain.

So... we've got a great setup for a comedy of errors, but that's not how the movie plays out.  Finn and Rey (and the fucking beach ball) all know exactly what they've got, and aside from the beach ball, no real reason to keep it.  I mean: There are a few points where the comedy of errors formula plays out, but rather than for laughs, its used simply to keep the weak 'plot' limping along. Finn can't tell Rey to abandon the beach ball on Tatooine because he just told her he's a big shot in the Revolution... and the power of boners is strong in that one!  Rey can't abandon it because... um... well.... because she's a chick and chicks dig cute, childish things?  Damn, JJ, you cold sonufabitch!

So the engine of the plot, motivation, is entirely replaced with a weak excuse for comedy.

Now, lets look at that arc again. See that big hump at the top of our 'plot arc'? Yeah, that thing. What is that?

Well, according to my napkin art diagram, that's when they blow up the starkiller base.

Which has fuck-all to do with finding Luke Skywalker, from the perspective of EITHER side.  Its a sideshow, a distraction... a tangent, utterly unrelated to the plot.  So is the set piece on Han Solo's scavenger ship for that matter, and for the most part the entire assault on Mara (baring Kylo Ren in the woods, honestly).

So... once we take out the shiny, shiny bling, what IS the big peak on our plot arc?

Well, that would be when R2D2 wakes up from his plot induced coma and reveals the second half of the map to Luke Skywalker.

And why does R2D2 wake up?

Because.

No, really.  

Just.... Because.


He doesn't even get a mild jostling. No. Its as if Luke Skywalker powered him down with an alarm set to wake him back up when the movie had run out of shiny distractions.  

Well. That was anti-climactic. Literally.


Lets go back a step to our character motivations, which would normally serve to drive a plot.

Finn's motivation is to escape the New Order and to get laid.  Clearly in that order, as he abandons Rey to avoid the New Order.  

Now, his actions on Mara, 'running away'... which ironically gave me a false sense of hope that the story was actually going somewhere... run contrary to his motivation.  What? Was he afraid that the Revolution might hand him over to the New Order? How does that even work?  Clearing disappearing anonymously with some tramp traders is the safer bet.

Not that it matters, since character motivations don't actually mean a hill of beans in this crazy film. Which is sort of my point.

Rey actually has an Anti-motivation. As a Gamer I'm sure you've all seen players who bring characters who have no reason to exist, much less adventure. Well, that's Rey.  Rey REALLY REALLY just wants to hang out in the desert. Presumably until her parents come back for her, but she never comes out and says it boldly (a remarkably light touch for JJ. In service to a bad cause, but still...).  She literally runs away from the plot over this very point (On Mara, which is why she's in the woods when Kylo Ren shows up...)

Kylo Ren? What exactly is his motivation. To impress Snape? Snoke? Snooki?  Gollum's slightly less impressive second cousin?  

Well, I think his motivation is best summed up as "I want to be evil and scary but I sort of suck at it".

Um. That's not a joke.  He seems to be deliberately fighting his better angels at every turn, looking for the best way to be a bad guy.  Its not... the worst villain motivation, but it is a bit... odd.

So we have a runaway and a stayaway fighting against "I'm not bad, but I wanna be", who honestly has zero fucks to give for either of them, except they have his precious map.

Oh sure, he eventually develops a boner for Rey too, because everyone does in this film, but that's not actually a possible plot driver until, what, two thirds of the way through the film?



So hopefully if you ever mention the weak plot to someone and they ask 'what do you mean?'... you can just point them here and save yourself some grief.

Quote from: Simlasa;873778I sure didn't get a Mary Sue vibe off of her... at least, no more than I get off of most Hollywood action heroes nowadays.

Yeah, well, you know, that's just, like, uh, your opinion, man.

(I'm quite happy to agree to disagree, you may well technically be right... which is the best kind of right.)

Quote from: Spike;873796So hopefully if you ever mention the weak plot to someone and they ask 'what do you mean?'... you can just point them here and save yourself some grief.

I play in a weekly Star Wars (EotE) game. I may need to do just that.

Seriously, good post by the way.

Quote from: Spike;873796Well, that's actually pretty simple. The Plot is 'Find Luke Skywalker'.  

(...)

Finn can't tell Rey to abandon the beach ball on Tatooine because he just told her he's a big shot in the Revolution... and the power of boners is strong in that one!  Rey can't abandon it because... um... well.... because she's a chick and chicks dig cute, childish things?

Your big mistake here is in equating plot to character motivation.

The plot may be "Find Luke Skywalker", just like the plot in A New Hope was "Destroy the Death Star". But that's not the motivation for Rey and Finn for the majority of the film any more than it's the motivation for Luke and Han.

For the first half of the film, the motivation of both Finn and Rey is "stay alive" (which manifests itself in different ways). This begins to shift for both of them on Maz's planet when they receive their hero's calls: Rey literally runs from her call (which is now "find Luke Skywalker"), only to embrace it later in the film (when she summons his lightsaber instead of rejecting it). Finn also runs from his call (which is now "save Rey"), but turns it around pretty quickly when he sees Kylo Ren take her.

QuoteAnd why does R2D2 wake up?

JJ Abrams claims it's just a delayed reaction from BB-8 retrieving the last part of the map.

My guess is that Abrams is lying, and my more specific guess is that R2-D2 wakes up immediately after Rey reaches him.

Quote from: Spike;872760Why does Han Solo show up when he does?

Because he's got an active scanning program keeping an eye out for the Falcon. This is explicitly stated in the film.

QuoteThen they talk about an awakening in the Force. Who awakened?

Why... Rey, the girl who hasn't done a god damn thing different from any other day, that's who.

We're actually shown a typical day in Rey's life. It notably doesn't involve stealing the Millennium Falcon and evading multiple TIE fighters. I'm not entirely sure what in the film could have possibly led you to believe that this would be stuff she does every single day.

QuoteNever mind that as the movie goes on Finn increasingly goes from a trained Stormtrooper to a hapless bumbling idiot, only as important to the "plot" as the Bothan Spies from A New Hope

First: No Bothan spies are present or mentioned in A New Hope.

Second: Finn continues playing a key role in the plot up to the moment he gets his back sliced open and goes unconscious for the last 10 minutes of the movie.

QuoteOh look: The bad guys have a giant planet destroying super weapon which they fire at a populated world.

No literally, that just happens.  Billions dead with no build up, no foreshadowing, and really no reason at all except to demonstrate that, yes, the Empire blows up worlds for fun.

Here's where I can't argue with you: Pretty much every single thing involving Starkiller Base is nonsensical and/or poorly handled.

First, the mere existence of yet another planet killer feels unnecessary. (I groaned when it first appeared on screen.)

Second, the destruction of Hasnian Prime is completely mishandled. Not only is no meaningful time given to make it clear what's being destroyed, the audience has no meaningful emotional attachment, either. Even once you puzzle out what happened (destruction of the New Republic capital and its entire fleet), it doesn't make any sense: Why the heck would the entire space fleet be kept on the planet?

Third, why can the destruction of the planet be seen from a completely different star system?

Fourth, the plan to destroy Starkiller Base is practically absurd. The characters all but turn to the camera and say, "We've all seen this plot before, right? Let's just do it."

Fifth, the actual visual storytelling of the assault on Starkiller Base is just incoherent noise. There's a kind of half-assed "bombing run" motif, but this oddly has no impact on any of the other action happening in the same location at the same time and is then quickly abandoned. Then they go for a half-assed version of the trench run from ANH (but with none of the storytelling structure) and follow it up with a half-assed version of the interior run from ROTJ.

(There's also the related issue of comparing the Resistance -- with the secret backing of the Republic -- with the fledgling Rebellion in ANH. The Rebellion launches a large and significant fleet of fighters and also has larger craft that aren't used because they would be useless against the Death Star's defenses. The Resistance -- again, forty years later and with the assistance of the Republic -- apparently consists entirely of twelve X-Wings.)

It's also notable how easily the entire Starkiller Base stuff could have been removed from the film while having no impact on the film whatsoever: The motivation from Han, Chewie, and Finn to go to the First Order base would have been to rescue Rey. Everything of importance that happens at the base could have still occurred. Ta-da! (I'd also add a bit where Rey discovers that the First Order has retrieved the rest of the map leading to Luke, so they'd also grab those on their way out.)

About the only thing of any value to be gained from the Starkiller Base is the thematic element of "the light going out". And even that doesn't actually work because... well, they fire the weapon twice, right? So why does it only eat the sun the second time? Nonsense all the way down.

If you absolutely needed to keep the Starkiller Base stuff in the film, what I would have done is NOT destroy Hasnian Prime midway through the film. Instead, the Resistance becomes aware of the threat and launches a mission at the end of the film to prevent them from using their one-shot weapon to take out the Republic capital. The back half of the film could then have been used to clearly communicate the stakes involved before the weapon is fired, and then a desperate assault would be launched in an effort to blow up the weapon before it's fired...

... and, importantly, it would fail. The plucky heroes don't destabilize the weapon at the last minute. It fires. The Republic capital is destroyed with the audience fully understanding the implications of that as it happens.

Not only would that have given the opportunity for a more coherent narrative, the inversion from ANH and ROTJ would have made the inclusion of a planet-killer more acceptable in general: It would be playing on one of the motifs of the saga instead of just repeating it.

Quote from: Spike;873354** This may be spotty. Plenty of light hearted, unserious fare has included torture and torture devices as somewhat comical and unserious.  Still, compare and contrast the handling of the interrogator probe in A New Hope, or the torture of Han Solo in Empire (screams of pain, people looking away even though they aren't in the same room, etc), with TFA, where its all pointing hands and funny face making.... you know, every hero gets tortured these days. They call it Tuesday.

Po Dameron is shown physically bloodied with a torture droid floating in the background (which is more physical damage than we see either Leia or Han suffer from their torture sessions) before Kylo Ren comes in and says, "I'm impressed that the torturers couldn't make you talk, so now I'm going to rip the answers out of you."

Quote from: 3rik;873596Though my wife and I enjoyed watching the movie I agree with all the criticism about pacing and continuity and lack of originality.

Agreed. This movie was far from Abrams' best work, and the weirdly amazing/stupid technology of the Star Wars universe kept grating on my nerves. That said, I'll concede it was a guilty pleasure. I reckon 5 years from now I'll be watching it on HBO or something and laughing (harder) at how bad it all was.

Hey, has anyone seen a good rant post of how the Star Wars universe could be improved/make more sense if they used 21st Century Earth technology in a few places?

Quote from: Doom;874745This movie was far from Abrams' best work

What's his best work?

Quote from: Doom;874745Hey, has anyone seen a good rant post of how the Star Wars universe could be improved/make more sense if they used 21st Century Earth technology in a few places?

All I know is the assumption that a futuristic internet and smartphones exist in the SW universe ruined the feel of the one SW campaign I played in.

Also, why aren't the droid flying all the ships?

Quote from: Shipyard Locked;874816All I know is the assumption that a futuristic internet and smartphones exist in the SW universe ruined the feel of the one SW campaign I played in.

Also, why aren't the droid flying all the ships?

Some of this stuff irked me too. But I was thinking about it, and was wondering if I were born in the internet age, would I be able to buy into a setting like that that didn't have basic things like some version of the internet? I have to admit though,  even though it is vaguely futuristic, I never really pictured the star wars universe having stuff like internet or sitcoms.

Quote from: Bren;874803What's his best work?

I lean towards Fringe.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;874825Some of this stuff irked me too. But I was thinking about it, and was wondering if I were born in the internet age, would I be able to buy into a setting like that that didn't have basic things like some version of the internet? I have to admit though,  even though it is vaguely futuristic, I never really pictured the star wars universe having stuff like internet or sitcoms.

Our Star Wars campaign had/has holoshows which we envisioned as being a lot like TV shows. Sometimes like TV shows of the 1950s or early 1960s.

Quote from: Doom;874828I lean towards Fringe.

Never seen any Abrahms TV. What's the selling point for Fringe? What did you like about it? Why should one watch it?

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;874825Some of this stuff irked me too. But I was thinking about it, and was wondering if I were born in the internet age, would I be able to buy into a setting like that that didn't have basic things like some version of the internet? I have to admit though,  even though it is vaguely futuristic, I never really pictured the star wars universe having stuff like internet or sitcoms.

I should probably ask some younger folk.  For me, I see the internet as a result of a very specific set of political and economic circumstances that was by no means unavoidable.  All it would have taken would have been the wrong sort of law or the pulling of funding in the wrong place and it likely would not have happened like it has.

Though i suppose you could argue that there is something like an internet, but people seem to like to have a droid access it through one of those little circular data ports and then beep about what they find.  I could see a given world having an internet that is just for that world.