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foxinthestarsExtended spoilery comments continue...
So picking up where we left off, the First Order attacks Maz’s place, and Kylo Ren captures Rey. But the people who are subtly not the Rebellion come flying in to save the day.
However, as I said previously, this was the point where, for me, the film started to stretch itself too thin.
Our remaining heroes join up with the notRebels, who include…
Leia. I was so happy to see Leia — and so disappointed, indeed in hindsight increasingly annoyed, that she got so little to say or do. Say what you will about pandering, but as soon as Han showed up, he was doing things that said to the audience, “Heck yes, this is Han Solo.” Leia… Well, she’s a general, that’s good, and she… is a general… and she tries to banter with Han but it’s understandably strained and doesn’t really get off the ground… and that’s pretty much it. No, oh, I dunno, calling up the Space Nazis and delivering a righteous and dignified verbal smackdown about how they’re doomed to defeat because everybody hates evil Nazis; no going on undercover missions and blasting her team out of tight spots — you know, princessy stuff like that, like Leia does. ::sigh:: Fingers crossed for the sequels…
Although in general I want to say I appreciate it in this movie: women and black men are allowed to be the heroes, and people are allowed to get old and still be the heroes.
Leia also has C-3PO with her, but… Something seemed a little off with him. The “red arm” bit was amusing, but it’s like he was kind of pointless, or was a shallow parody of himself. I dunno, I can’t really put my finger on it…
At Resistance HQ we rack up some more nostalgia points, including the appearance of R2-D2. Yay, R2! Aww, how are we going to wake him up? (Spoiler: we kind of aren’t.) None of it really has a chance to sink in, though.
Meanwhile on the Dark Side, a mostly-cool scene still manages to stretch itself too thin as Ren tries his mind-reading trick on Rey. It was a nice twist when she told him to take off the mask and he just did it with no sense that it threatened him to do so, but in hindsight that did like drop the last pretense that he was some kind of irresistible force; no, there’s a character under there with human motivations, motivations he let slip more than he wanted to as the mind-reading thing backfired on him and instead of giving him anything, Rey got from him: “You’re afraid you’ll never be as strong as Darth Vader.”
Now, this was a cool line, not least for the “You go, girl!” aspect as I was totally rooting for Rey there, but… I felt like the line itself had about half of the impact and insight it was supposed to. I mean, we’d seen the grandpa complex and stuff, and this tells us about gnawing insecurity, but “never be as strong as” made me think “Is he trying to compete with Vader? How does that work with what we’ve seen so far?” Maybe that’s just my own quirky not getting it, but I would’ve loved to tell the writers “Okay, pretend I don’t know who Darth Vader is and then sell that line to me.” Not that I actually don’t know (although I did see Phantom Menace, so maybe I don’t), but I think the exercise would have given it more strength and clarity.
But interrogating Rey isn’t all the First Order is up to because it turns out they have a… star killer… thing.
Oh, boy, the star killer thing.
(Oh, boy, the unveiling ceremony. OKAY, THEY’RE SPACE NAZIS. WE GET IT. Dang, I don’t even remember the Empire being this over-the-top.)
Now, the star killer thing didn’t like actively annoy me while I was watching the film, but it did fall flat — it’s a retread that doesn’t really work — and the more I think about it afterward, the more it falls apart, to the point that all the old jokes about the Death Star engineers start to seem outdated. So you built it into a planet and using it depletes the star that the said planet is orbiting. So… what, are you moving the planet around? Apparently not, because it still has vegetation on it that wouldn’t survive deep space… Are you going to move the star killer thing from this planet to another one? Because it looks pretty solidly built in. But if you’re not moving it, then you built this whole thing just to get off one or two shots because then you’re out of ammo and you’re left there on a dark, freezing planet because you depleted its sun. (So yeah, all that vegetation? Gonna die. There are probably animals there, too, like bunny rabbits and stuff, all gonna die…) Oh, and wouldn’t you need precise timing to even aim the thing because you built it into a planet which, like, orbits and rotates? (Am I forgetting something here?) Then there’s the issue of how/whether they’re draining the sun without altering its mass because doing that would get you into a whole other set of problems… (Yeah, screwing with the sun of the planet you’re standing on, this is Star Trek: Generations caliber stupid.) Design-wise it seems like a much worse idea than the Death Star, is all.
And impact-wise it seems not that much better, at least from this side of the fourth wall. It’s like how an untrained human mind will just hit a certain wall of “unfathomably large number” beyond which a billion and a trillion sound subjectively about the same. The Death Star had already hit the wall of “unfathomably evil.” If you make it ten times as big it’s still “unfathomably evil;” doesn’t really feel much different.
Except that it does in this case, because A New Hope gave us reasons to care about what the Death Star destroyed. Yes, we’d never met the people of Alderan, but we knew that they were Leia’s people, and we were totally on Leia’s side as the villains threatened to destroy her home and presumably kill her loved ones along with countless other innocents. We saw her finally give in to their demands, only to be betrayed (hell yes she lied, but you don’t know that the first time you watch that scene). And not only do we feel it through our connection with Leia, Obi-Wan Kenobi makes sure we know that this was a crime on a cosmic scale; the “great disturbance in the Force” line is iconic because it worked. Treating planetary-scale genocide with appropriate gravitas is a tall order, but given the genre space, they did a good job (I mean it’s space opera, not Schindler’s List).
On the other hand, the star killer thing takes out a whole solar system — two if you count the one it’s being fired from ::eyeroll:: — and one of them is full of people we don’t know anything about and have only the most tenuous connection to. They’re allies of people we kind of only just met. Yeah. Well, that’s one excuse to have a climactic set piece, I guess.
Sidenote to finish up the day: what is even going on with the two sides here? In the opening I got the idea that the First Order was some kind of reactionary insurgency, but they look damn professional. And calling yourself the “Resistance” sort of implies that you’re the insurgency against a stronger corrupt power… Are they both fringe elements, and if so, what the heck is going on in the mainstream? (Granted this is probably better than knowing what the heck is going on and finding that, as Confused Matthew said of the prequels, the galaxy is just “set up all stupid,” but that’s a low bar, you can do better.) Basically, the First Order and the Resistance proceed almost exactly as if they were the Empire and the Rebellion.
More still to come...
So picking up where we left off, the First Order attacks Maz’s place, and Kylo Ren captures Rey. But the people who are subtly not the Rebellion come flying in to save the day.
However, as I said previously, this was the point where, for me, the film started to stretch itself too thin.
Our remaining heroes join up with the notRebels, who include…
Leia. I was so happy to see Leia — and so disappointed, indeed in hindsight increasingly annoyed, that she got so little to say or do. Say what you will about pandering, but as soon as Han showed up, he was doing things that said to the audience, “Heck yes, this is Han Solo.” Leia… Well, she’s a general, that’s good, and she… is a general… and she tries to banter with Han but it’s understandably strained and doesn’t really get off the ground… and that’s pretty much it. No, oh, I dunno, calling up the Space Nazis and delivering a righteous and dignified verbal smackdown about how they’re doomed to defeat because everybody hates evil Nazis; no going on undercover missions and blasting her team out of tight spots — you know, princessy stuff like that, like Leia does. ::sigh:: Fingers crossed for the sequels…
Although in general I want to say I appreciate it in this movie: women and black men are allowed to be the heroes, and people are allowed to get old and still be the heroes.
Leia also has C-3PO with her, but… Something seemed a little off with him. The “red arm” bit was amusing, but it’s like he was kind of pointless, or was a shallow parody of himself. I dunno, I can’t really put my finger on it…
At Resistance HQ we rack up some more nostalgia points, including the appearance of R2-D2. Yay, R2! Aww, how are we going to wake him up? (Spoiler: we kind of aren’t.) None of it really has a chance to sink in, though.
Meanwhile on the Dark Side, a mostly-cool scene still manages to stretch itself too thin as Ren tries his mind-reading trick on Rey. It was a nice twist when she told him to take off the mask and he just did it with no sense that it threatened him to do so, but in hindsight that did like drop the last pretense that he was some kind of irresistible force; no, there’s a character under there with human motivations, motivations he let slip more than he wanted to as the mind-reading thing backfired on him and instead of giving him anything, Rey got from him: “You’re afraid you’ll never be as strong as Darth Vader.”
Now, this was a cool line, not least for the “You go, girl!” aspect as I was totally rooting for Rey there, but… I felt like the line itself had about half of the impact and insight it was supposed to. I mean, we’d seen the grandpa complex and stuff, and this tells us about gnawing insecurity, but “never be as strong as” made me think “Is he trying to compete with Vader? How does that work with what we’ve seen so far?” Maybe that’s just my own quirky not getting it, but I would’ve loved to tell the writers “Okay, pretend I don’t know who Darth Vader is and then sell that line to me.” Not that I actually don’t know (although I did see Phantom Menace, so maybe I don’t), but I think the exercise would have given it more strength and clarity.
But interrogating Rey isn’t all the First Order is up to because it turns out they have a… star killer… thing.
Oh, boy, the star killer thing.
(Oh, boy, the unveiling ceremony. OKAY, THEY’RE SPACE NAZIS. WE GET IT. Dang, I don’t even remember the Empire being this over-the-top.)
Now, the star killer thing didn’t like actively annoy me while I was watching the film, but it did fall flat — it’s a retread that doesn’t really work — and the more I think about it afterward, the more it falls apart, to the point that all the old jokes about the Death Star engineers start to seem outdated. So you built it into a planet and using it depletes the star that the said planet is orbiting. So… what, are you moving the planet around? Apparently not, because it still has vegetation on it that wouldn’t survive deep space… Are you going to move the star killer thing from this planet to another one? Because it looks pretty solidly built in. But if you’re not moving it, then you built this whole thing just to get off one or two shots because then you’re out of ammo and you’re left there on a dark, freezing planet because you depleted its sun. (So yeah, all that vegetation? Gonna die. There are probably animals there, too, like bunny rabbits and stuff, all gonna die…) Oh, and wouldn’t you need precise timing to even aim the thing because you built it into a planet which, like, orbits and rotates? (Am I forgetting something here?) Then there’s the issue of how/whether they’re draining the sun without altering its mass because doing that would get you into a whole other set of problems… (Yeah, screwing with the sun of the planet you’re standing on, this is Star Trek: Generations caliber stupid.) Design-wise it seems like a much worse idea than the Death Star, is all.
And impact-wise it seems not that much better, at least from this side of the fourth wall. It’s like how an untrained human mind will just hit a certain wall of “unfathomably large number” beyond which a billion and a trillion sound subjectively about the same. The Death Star had already hit the wall of “unfathomably evil.” If you make it ten times as big it’s still “unfathomably evil;” doesn’t really feel much different.
Except that it does in this case, because A New Hope gave us reasons to care about what the Death Star destroyed. Yes, we’d never met the people of Alderan, but we knew that they were Leia’s people, and we were totally on Leia’s side as the villains threatened to destroy her home and presumably kill her loved ones along with countless other innocents. We saw her finally give in to their demands, only to be betrayed (hell yes she lied, but you don’t know that the first time you watch that scene). And not only do we feel it through our connection with Leia, Obi-Wan Kenobi makes sure we know that this was a crime on a cosmic scale; the “great disturbance in the Force” line is iconic because it worked. Treating planetary-scale genocide with appropriate gravitas is a tall order, but given the genre space, they did a good job (I mean it’s space opera, not Schindler’s List).
On the other hand, the star killer thing takes out a whole solar system — two if you count the one it’s being fired from ::eyeroll:: — and one of them is full of people we don’t know anything about and have only the most tenuous connection to. They’re allies of people we kind of only just met. Yeah. Well, that’s one excuse to have a climactic set piece, I guess.
Sidenote to finish up the day: what is even going on with the two sides here? In the opening I got the idea that the First Order was some kind of reactionary insurgency, but they look damn professional. And calling yourself the “Resistance” sort of implies that you’re the insurgency against a stronger corrupt power… Are they both fringe elements, and if so, what the heck is going on in the mainstream? (Granted this is probably better than knowing what the heck is going on and finding that, as Confused Matthew said of the prequels, the galaxy is just “set up all stupid,” but that’s a low bar, you can do better.) Basically, the First Order and the Resistance proceed almost exactly as if they were the Empire and the Rebellion.
More still to come...
no subject
Date: 2016-01-19 06:21 am (UTC)The Starkiller thing had me WTFing in the theater. It is so ridiculous it actually took me out of the movie a little and I had to go "You know what, it's Star Wars, just go with it." and ignore the zillions of reasons why it is completely ridiculous.
Sidenote to finish up the day: what is even going on with the two sides here?
This is partially headcanon, but I think (though this doesn't explain the First Order's name)... I think what's supposed to have happened is that the Rebellion/New Republic couldn't get the entire Old Republic back and made a peace treaty with the Imperial Remnant (much as eventually happened in the EU) and either the Imperial Remnant came to style itself as the First Order, or an extremist group in it took it over and restyled it to the First Order. The Resistance is people in Imperial Remnant space (as opposed to New Republic space) who object to the First Order. I think. It is decidedly unclear.
no subject
Date: 2016-01-19 08:48 pm (UTC)And as mentioned, I do wish they'd do something with her Force powers. Granted, you don't want the old heroes to take over the new trilogy too much, but there's plenty of room for more awesome supporting roles. For example, Leia giving Rey some guidance from her own none-too-standard experience of being strong in the Force; once that possibility occurred to me, I think it was a big missed opportunity.
(Starkiller Thing seems to have its own thread now, so I'll save anything more on it.)
no subject
Date: 2016-01-20 08:52 am (UTC)But if Leia's staying behind because she's the general, then her being the general needed to be beefed up. We needed to see her making important calls and telling people what to do and whatnot, much more than we did. :\