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foxinthestarsFinally doing my spoilery thoughts on The Force Awakens. They ran long, so I'm going to split it into parts.
Note that I’ve seen it once, more than two weeks ago, and I don’t go all out for reading the meta, so I’m just going to remark on it as best I remember it and I may have some errors. But, here we go…
Right off the bat, Max von Sydow as a Jedi is something I never knew I needed. Why wasn’t he in the series until now? Why wasn’t he actually a Jedi? Why did they kill him off so fast??
But more to the meat of that scene, I was hooked immediately by seeing Storm Troopers behave like human beings and was disappointed as the movie continued and it soon became clear that we’re not generally meant to think about that, it’s just that Finn is a special snowflake. Which is nothing against him, mind. I LOVE Finn, I just wish/hope they would do more with that.
I also note that what traumatized Finn in that scene was of course the evil of his orders, but also — and I haven’t seen anyone mention this part — the death of a comrade. Forget laser-axe dude, I want to know who THAT Storm Trooper was. And the way the incident marked Finn as an individual both figuratively and literally worked. Melodramatic, but a good move.
To take the broad view for a moment, yes, I love Finn. In my spoiler-free thoughts I mentioned that one main character ends the film at a decent checkpoint in their arc, and Finn is the one I meant. Right away we see the challenge for him as he is fundamentally decent despite all odds and also deeply, justifiably scared, and in the course of the film we see him gain the courage to make his goodness win out over his fear. If some evil writer decides that he doesn’t wake up after this movie, I’ll be angry and sad because I love him and that would be a seriously jerk move, but I would at least say that he’d gotten a story.
And of course, BB-8 is adorable. Previously I’d seen R2 as the cute little droid, but BB-8 outdid him handily — especially later when we get the side-by-side and see how much smaller BB-8 is — which, thinking on it, would make sense, that technology would advance in the meantime and lead to droids getting smaller, but mostly cuteness. He’s like the Gen1 Bumblebee of Star Wars droids. No, cuter. (Poor R2 and Bumblebee are disadvantaged by having been created before moe was a thing.)
BB-8 does get us into how much retreading of A New Hope goes on here (droid lost on desert planet with mission to deliver information…). It doesn’t bug me in this instance, and I actually think that to some extent it’s justifiable — because, as previously stated, the A-number-one thing this movie needed to do was to be an actual honest-to-god Star Wars movie, to reassure people that they’re making those again. A certain amount of underlining via retreading is perhaps a lazy and safe way to do that, but if it works here on its own terms, I don’t mind.
And I think it does work here, because it leads us into Rey’s life — and this is where I really KNEW that I was in the Star Wars universe. A key difference between Star Trek and Star Wars is that Trek supposes a spacefaring society would have an economy of abundance; Star Wars very pointedly does not, or doesn’t focus on the people who experience it. In Star Wars, our people are the ones who take to the stars in the jalopies and hot rods they can piece together.
And I mentioned before how taken I was with the starship graveyard… But it came up in comments that in a way it kind of backfired for me. I had to think about it for days before I realized that that was meant to convey that a long time had passed. In the moment it put me right back into the original trilogy, like I would totally believe one of these was left behind after every orbital space battle and people would be picking it over because what, you think the Empire was big into recycling? What did come through was the previously-mentioned spot-on Star Wars aesthetic.
I have to admit, though, I can’t think of anything much to say about Rey herself. Friends have commented on her better than I could. Also, she really doesn’t seem to have any kind of complete arc yet. She’s gotten beyond her restricted life on Jakku and has gotten past her initial fear to start using the Force, but she’s only just starting her journey with the Force at the end of the film, and we haven’t really learned anything about her family or dealt with her backstory yet…
So BB-8 runs into Rey, the two of them run into Finn, and the three of them steal the Millennium Falcon, have some fun flying/shooting action, and soon run into…
Han and Chewie! Yay!!
Now, Confused Matthew (who has sadly stopped doing videos and just writes on Facebook now) didn’t care for the hijinks that ensue, what with the obvious nostalgia-pandering and stuff, but I’m still okay with it. Again, it was reassuring and fun, if admittedly shameless.
Once hijinks are over and we actually get talking to Han, though, once again the “passage of time” markers didn’t work on me. Having our new heroes not believe in the Force just turned them into Flat-Earth Atheists and made for clunky and needless retreading. I mean, in A New Hope, having the characters view the Force as mythical really helped because it let us discover it along with Luke, but at this point the conceit is no longer necessary or useful. I think it would have been more effective to, for example, have Rey and Finn see the Jedi as something great that existed in the past but is now extinct — be something we hadn’t seen before, convey kind of a regretful backward glance, make the hope of finding Luke more meaningful…
But anyway, we get the needless retread exposition out of the way and then Han takes the kids to meet…
MAZ! OMG, I love Maz! And while I’m not usually one for meta, somewhere I ran across the tidbit that her full name is Maz Kanata. Granted, Star Wars names are a thing unto themselves, but I can’t think it’s a coincidence that her surname is Japanese for “beyond” — because okay, Han pulled mentor duty, but he brought in Maz to do the heavy lift; she was the one who showed our new heroes the truth about themselves that they already knew but were avoiding, and she challenged them to move beyond who they’d been up to that point. Almost a Yoda figure, really (yes, there was a point where I wondered if she’d built her bar on top of that certain cave) — and an awesome old woman to boot, we can never have too many of those.
So Maz is awesome and our new heroes have some Moments of Truth, but then the Space Nazis who are somehow subtly not the Empire attack.
And okay, I forgot where all the cuts to the First Order were in the sequence, so I’ll just lever in those comments now.
You know, the first time I saw nottheEmperor, I didn’t realize it was a hologram, I just thought he was that big, like we were in Macross or Fantastic Children or something. Who knows, maybe he is. I guess hologram technology has gotten better enough to fool me. Snoke was his name, wasn’t it…? As mentioned above, Star Wars names are a thing unto themselves, but I’m sorry, that one just sounds dumb. I mean, evil, sure, but less “serious Space Hitler” and more “tobacco product marketed to children.”
But really, the First Order side of this movie is all about Kylo Ren. He starts out obviously threatening as a Vader-like figure (IIRC, he gave the order to slaughter the villagers at the beginning, and he can read people’s minds!), but as it goes on he tweaks that expectation by being an imperfect villain. I was particularly taken by the way he reacts to bad news, how it’s so openly juvenile compared to the analogous scenes in the original trilogy. Vader finds your lack of faith disturbing; Ren throws a tantrum and breaks his toys. And this does say important things about Ren as a character, but I also think it may be broader than that, more a revelation than a difference, and it’s a take on the Dark Side that I haven’t seen before but that makes a lot of sense: deriving power by striking out with the sharp edge of your emotions is fundamentally immature. Maybe it always was and our previous villains were just better at glossing that over. Ren also sometimes takes a more pleading tone with Snoke than anything Vader would have done. And of course we see his grandpa complex toward Vader — whom, it’s important to remember, he never actually met. The fact that this Vader figure he’s trying to live up to is a creation of his own mind only tells you how doomed he is; you can never win a game like that against yourself.
And just as a positive nitpick, I love that his mask has dents in it; goes back to that whole Star Wars aesthetic.
More in the coming days...
Note that I’ve seen it once, more than two weeks ago, and I don’t go all out for reading the meta, so I’m just going to remark on it as best I remember it and I may have some errors. But, here we go…
Right off the bat, Max von Sydow as a Jedi is something I never knew I needed. Why wasn’t he in the series until now? Why wasn’t he actually a Jedi? Why did they kill him off so fast??
But more to the meat of that scene, I was hooked immediately by seeing Storm Troopers behave like human beings and was disappointed as the movie continued and it soon became clear that we’re not generally meant to think about that, it’s just that Finn is a special snowflake. Which is nothing against him, mind. I LOVE Finn, I just wish/hope they would do more with that.
I also note that what traumatized Finn in that scene was of course the evil of his orders, but also — and I haven’t seen anyone mention this part — the death of a comrade. Forget laser-axe dude, I want to know who THAT Storm Trooper was. And the way the incident marked Finn as an individual both figuratively and literally worked. Melodramatic, but a good move.
To take the broad view for a moment, yes, I love Finn. In my spoiler-free thoughts I mentioned that one main character ends the film at a decent checkpoint in their arc, and Finn is the one I meant. Right away we see the challenge for him as he is fundamentally decent despite all odds and also deeply, justifiably scared, and in the course of the film we see him gain the courage to make his goodness win out over his fear. If some evil writer decides that he doesn’t wake up after this movie, I’ll be angry and sad because I love him and that would be a seriously jerk move, but I would at least say that he’d gotten a story.
And of course, BB-8 is adorable. Previously I’d seen R2 as the cute little droid, but BB-8 outdid him handily — especially later when we get the side-by-side and see how much smaller BB-8 is — which, thinking on it, would make sense, that technology would advance in the meantime and lead to droids getting smaller, but mostly cuteness. He’s like the Gen1 Bumblebee of Star Wars droids. No, cuter. (Poor R2 and Bumblebee are disadvantaged by having been created before moe was a thing.)
BB-8 does get us into how much retreading of A New Hope goes on here (droid lost on desert planet with mission to deliver information…). It doesn’t bug me in this instance, and I actually think that to some extent it’s justifiable — because, as previously stated, the A-number-one thing this movie needed to do was to be an actual honest-to-god Star Wars movie, to reassure people that they’re making those again. A certain amount of underlining via retreading is perhaps a lazy and safe way to do that, but if it works here on its own terms, I don’t mind.
And I think it does work here, because it leads us into Rey’s life — and this is where I really KNEW that I was in the Star Wars universe. A key difference between Star Trek and Star Wars is that Trek supposes a spacefaring society would have an economy of abundance; Star Wars very pointedly does not, or doesn’t focus on the people who experience it. In Star Wars, our people are the ones who take to the stars in the jalopies and hot rods they can piece together.
And I mentioned before how taken I was with the starship graveyard… But it came up in comments that in a way it kind of backfired for me. I had to think about it for days before I realized that that was meant to convey that a long time had passed. In the moment it put me right back into the original trilogy, like I would totally believe one of these was left behind after every orbital space battle and people would be picking it over because what, you think the Empire was big into recycling? What did come through was the previously-mentioned spot-on Star Wars aesthetic.
I have to admit, though, I can’t think of anything much to say about Rey herself. Friends have commented on her better than I could. Also, she really doesn’t seem to have any kind of complete arc yet. She’s gotten beyond her restricted life on Jakku and has gotten past her initial fear to start using the Force, but she’s only just starting her journey with the Force at the end of the film, and we haven’t really learned anything about her family or dealt with her backstory yet…
So BB-8 runs into Rey, the two of them run into Finn, and the three of them steal the Millennium Falcon, have some fun flying/shooting action, and soon run into…
Han and Chewie! Yay!!
Now, Confused Matthew (who has sadly stopped doing videos and just writes on Facebook now) didn’t care for the hijinks that ensue, what with the obvious nostalgia-pandering and stuff, but I’m still okay with it. Again, it was reassuring and fun, if admittedly shameless.
Once hijinks are over and we actually get talking to Han, though, once again the “passage of time” markers didn’t work on me. Having our new heroes not believe in the Force just turned them into Flat-Earth Atheists and made for clunky and needless retreading. I mean, in A New Hope, having the characters view the Force as mythical really helped because it let us discover it along with Luke, but at this point the conceit is no longer necessary or useful. I think it would have been more effective to, for example, have Rey and Finn see the Jedi as something great that existed in the past but is now extinct — be something we hadn’t seen before, convey kind of a regretful backward glance, make the hope of finding Luke more meaningful…
But anyway, we get the needless retread exposition out of the way and then Han takes the kids to meet…
MAZ! OMG, I love Maz! And while I’m not usually one for meta, somewhere I ran across the tidbit that her full name is Maz Kanata. Granted, Star Wars names are a thing unto themselves, but I can’t think it’s a coincidence that her surname is Japanese for “beyond” — because okay, Han pulled mentor duty, but he brought in Maz to do the heavy lift; she was the one who showed our new heroes the truth about themselves that they already knew but were avoiding, and she challenged them to move beyond who they’d been up to that point. Almost a Yoda figure, really (yes, there was a point where I wondered if she’d built her bar on top of that certain cave) — and an awesome old woman to boot, we can never have too many of those.
So Maz is awesome and our new heroes have some Moments of Truth, but then the Space Nazis who are somehow subtly not the Empire attack.
And okay, I forgot where all the cuts to the First Order were in the sequence, so I’ll just lever in those comments now.
You know, the first time I saw nottheEmperor, I didn’t realize it was a hologram, I just thought he was that big, like we were in Macross or Fantastic Children or something. Who knows, maybe he is. I guess hologram technology has gotten better enough to fool me. Snoke was his name, wasn’t it…? As mentioned above, Star Wars names are a thing unto themselves, but I’m sorry, that one just sounds dumb. I mean, evil, sure, but less “serious Space Hitler” and more “tobacco product marketed to children.”
But really, the First Order side of this movie is all about Kylo Ren. He starts out obviously threatening as a Vader-like figure (IIRC, he gave the order to slaughter the villagers at the beginning, and he can read people’s minds!), but as it goes on he tweaks that expectation by being an imperfect villain. I was particularly taken by the way he reacts to bad news, how it’s so openly juvenile compared to the analogous scenes in the original trilogy. Vader finds your lack of faith disturbing; Ren throws a tantrum and breaks his toys. And this does say important things about Ren as a character, but I also think it may be broader than that, more a revelation than a difference, and it’s a take on the Dark Side that I haven’t seen before but that makes a lot of sense: deriving power by striking out with the sharp edge of your emotions is fundamentally immature. Maybe it always was and our previous villains were just better at glossing that over. Ren also sometimes takes a more pleading tone with Snoke than anything Vader would have done. And of course we see his grandpa complex toward Vader — whom, it’s important to remember, he never actually met. The fact that this Vader figure he’s trying to live up to is a creation of his own mind only tells you how doomed he is; you can never win a game like that against yourself.
And just as a positive nitpick, I love that his mask has dents in it; goes back to that whole Star Wars aesthetic.
More in the coming days...
no subject
Date: 2016-01-19 06:32 am (UTC)This drove me nuts. I really like Finn, but I really hated that they had him have no problem with fighting against people who were his fellows moments before. (But I blame bad writing, not Finn.) I would so much rather he struggled with that and had tried to find ways to not directly fight the other stormtroopers.
I've seen it posited that it would've been better if the map MacGuffen was in the Falcon's databanks. And I agree. Some minor tweaks to the story would've been in order, but if Luke had intended for only Han and Leia to be able to find him and so the information was put somewhere most people wouldn't have access to. And then the ship was stolen... (As it is, I don't get the map at all.)
I still haven't decided if Snoke is supposed to be some weird alien or a really scarred human. Or the Wizard of Oz. Like...is that really him? Or is that a front? IDK.
(I've got to say, though, I always thought the Dark Side was pretty immature. And some of the EU/Legends stuff really played up just how petty Sith could be. Kylo fits right in with that tradition. Granted, more powerful Sith usually have it much more together. But Kylo isn't a powerful Sith. I mean, he could become one, but right now he seems much more like a wannabe. He has power (Force Use) but not power (respect, authority, etc). If that makes sense?
no subject
Date: 2016-01-19 07:30 pm (UTC)Re: Snoke, I'm hoping Wizard of Oz, even if the man behind the curtain isn't who I suggested. (My second choice would be actual Zentradi type, although admittedly that could make the big fight scene look ridiculous.)
Re: Dark Side immaturity, yeah. I'm enough of a casual fan that I'm pretty much just working from the movies (original trilogy plus ep 1 except I don't really consider ep 1 canon). I'd never noticed it before --- but once Ren made it obvious it was like it was there all along; I was choosing the words intentionally when I called his display more "openly" juvenile. See Vader: Force-choking people who shoot their mouths off in board meetings or fail at missions despite creditable effort is pretty damn immature too, he was just able to paper it over with sheer badassery/awesome presence. So I think it's a good development for the movies overall to see the paper peel and tear.
no subject
Date: 2016-01-19 08:10 pm (UTC)(And part of me wants that not to be what Snoke really looks like because Star Wars has this longstanding problem with Evil Makes You Ugly which has all kinds of unfortunate implications. Someone in universe playing on that idea would be at least a little better.)
Yeah, he doesn't have the presence/power/something to make his outbursts look cool and impressive rather than like tantrums. ... Actually, I'm really curious about Kylo's training. He seems to have a lot of, er, Force Use powers - pulling information out of people's minds, freezing people in place, freezing blaster bolts in place, etc, but his lightsaber fighting seems...less practiced? I mean, we only see him fight after he's been injured, and he may not have seen Finn as much of a threat, but he fights like his saber - it's impressive looking, but maybe not put together that well. (Kudos to the people doing the fight choreography there.)
no subject
Date: 2016-01-20 04:32 am (UTC)(Totally with you on the Evil Makes You Ugly thing.)
The obvious thing Ren can't pull off there is the illusion of calm --- but thinking on this, I'm seeing another angle now. Ren's tantrums look more juvenile, but may actually be less so --- because another obvious difference is that when Vader was mad, he *hurt people.* If Ren directs his outbursts at inanimate objects, that's probably a good sign for him. (He does do terrible things of course, but those seem to have more to do with what he thinks he's supposed to do in the role he's trying to live up to --- which is no kind of justification, but does indicate a different sort of character).
I also find his lightsaber interesting. I mean, on one level it's just the latest entry in the "how many cool lightsaber configurations can we make (merchandise of)" bit that started with Darth Maul, but I'm also tempted to see the short arms as like pressure vents, suggesting that he's not fully in control of his power and/or his lightsaber wasn't put together that well.
no subject
Date: 2016-01-20 08:34 am (UTC)I'm both curious and very puzzled as to what his start of darkness was. Like, Palpatine manipulated Anakin to the Dark Side by taking advantage of his anger, his need for control, and his desire to protect the people he loves. What, exactly, did Snoke grab onto in Kylo Ren? Fear that he can't live up to his family? But how did that get pasted onto Vader???
And, like, his confrontation with Han - which should've given us more insight - kind of just confused things more. It's like he thinks he has to be on the path he's on. Did Snoke either get him to do something terrible or make him believe he had? Fool him into believing he can only have Dark Side power? I just...something's really weird there.
As for Snoke, one thing potentially in favor of him being a Wizard of Oz deal is that he seems way more uncanny valley than the other CGI people in the movie. Yes, he's also a hologram, but...
no subject
Date: 2016-01-20 08:18 pm (UTC)Being as casual a fan of it as I am, I probably wouldn't feel so compelled to see this or the next Star Wars in its theatrical run if it wasn't so popular that it looms so large in the culture. Although that hasn't been enough to get me into the Marvel Cinematic Universe yet...
no subject
Date: 2016-01-20 11:11 pm (UTC)Even I couldn't exactly tell you why it's my fandom. Something about the world is super appealing. Even if I fell out of it for a while, and didn't get into it until I was in 8th grade to begin with. Maybe because it sits on a fantasy/sci-fi crossroads, with piles of aliens and a lived in looking universe, and fairly ordinary heroes and the power of friendship and all. And a really diverse, big world to play in.
(Not that there aren't other franchises that have all or some of that. IDK.)