I don't want to ruin the movie for anyone who hasn't seen it yet, so here's my only SPOILERS:
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SPOILERS
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1) I hate FUCKING CLIFF HANGERS! Unless you have a good enough story to overlook it. TESB works. TFA does not.
2) Harrison Ford finally got his wish.
3) There's a reason Mark Hamill isn't featured in the teasers. He does NOT have one FUCKING WORD of DIALOGUE!
4) Leia and Rey ROCKED!
5) J.J. Abrams kept to the spirit of the original.
I'll tell you right now. This isn't a complete story. I think that's my biggest problem with TFA. The original Star Wars had a complete story. Sure there was stuff before and stuff after, but the story as shown on the screen had complete plot and character arcs. It's why I use it an a prime example of the classic three-act structure for newbie writers.
But this? This kind half-assed of story crap is why readers hate a lot of indie writers.
So between my two personalities, I have to give Star Wars: The Force Awakens a 6 out of 10.
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P.S. There's SPOILERS in the comments, so don't read 'em if you haven't seen it!
I was disappointed too. Yes, there was a lot of cool stuff, great lines, I like the new characters, blah-blah-blah. But looking at the story, it's as you said -- it feels like a chunk ripped out of the middle of the story. In the original Star Wars, and even Phantom Menace, there was a lot of set-up, layers of story and plot and subplot, and especially after TPM (which was made with the knowledge that there'd be more coming after it, unlike the first movie) we were left wondering what was going to happen, how this or that was going to turn out, etc. It FELT like the first chunk of a series/trilogy/whatever. This time, though, it felt like an episode seven. It just sort of did whatever, didn't do a lot of set-up, didn't dangle all that many plot lines in front of us. It's like it spent so much time giving us fan-service scenes (like the Millenium Falcon zipping around the star destroyer graveyard, which was very cool but didn't further the plot much) that they didn't have time to set up much in the way of STORY.
ReplyDeleteRight now, in the series, the Republic is the legitimate, established government, the bad guys (I don't even remember the name of their group right now, which tells you something) are agitating to take over, and somehow got control of the clone (are they even clones anymore?) troopers, and Han and Leia's kid got pissed at Luke during Jedi training and decided to go start his own club. Um, okay. So yeah, the rebels (who are the bad guys this time) seem to have a lot of troops and materials which they got from... where? There's a lot of politics that should've been explained but weren't. I don't know enough about what's going on to feel terribly excited about it. Hey, bad guys versus good guys! isn't enough to get me bouncing up and down.
And you'd think that after all this time, the bad guys would've figured that when you're superweapon plans go missing, you don't let the droid get away. [eyeroll]
It wasn't a BAD movie, and I'm looking forward to seeing the next one, as much because I'm hoping for a bit more plot and some more explanation of WTF is going on and how we got to where we are. I was disappointed, though. I think Phantom Menace did a much better job of setting up a new trilogy, and don't care how many millions of fans disagree with me. :P
Angie
According to Finn in the movie, he was taken as a baby from his parents and "conditioned". Obviously, it didn't take. Part of what pisses me off is Disney's rejecting all of the EU and then trying to rewrite it. You end up with another JJ Abrams mess just like Star Trek: Into Darkness. The only difference between SW:TFA and ST:ID is I walked out more confused and disappointed than out-and-out pissed.
DeleteHey...at least it's only 2 years before we get to find out what really happened in this movie.
ReplyDeleteMaybe a double post...
ReplyDeleteAt least we only have to wait 2 years to see if this movie was mysterious or just missing basic stuff. :/