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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: 2016-01-20 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.)