Star Wars: Episode VII: Revenge Of The Septuagenarian

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david said:
I was taken aback by the amount of humorous dialogue in this film. You're right about the forced nature of Finn and Poe's friendship.


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Click to expand...

Their friendship may not be forced at all.

In real life under difficult, very difficult circumstances where strangers are thrown together fast friendship, deep bonds can form.
 
This isn't about whether or not said bonding happens in real life. It's about the way the dialogue is written, and how it's directed and acted.
 
b398e930ca009b2195aa8c45a224f325091fee420e6276690e5c250dad9327f3.jpg
 
That's a pretty great poster. Hopefully it can build some buzz, along with a new trailer. The last one was mostly bland to me.
 
Oh.... That's an awesome poster!

Actually I saw a smaller photo on io9 earlier. But I was so busy looking at the
island part (it was shot in the Maldives) that I actually never glanced up enough
to see the Death Star. :lol:

Now I c it !

Thanks, gump!
 
The new behind the scenes feature is nice and all...but I still have major doubts given all the re-shoots and that these anthology movies have hardly had the same care and oversight of the new trilogy.
 
Oh my GOD that new trailer is amazing. Disney has me utterly trapped supporting their Lucasfilm money making machine.
 
I was late to the party with this one - I heard it mentioned, but didn't know what it was. Thought it was one of those spin-off thingies like Clone Wars or whatever.

HO SHIT. I'm in. Yes, please.
 
Not judging no a full movie on a trailer versus a full movie on a full movie... But... Yeah no way Rogue One isn't better.
 
Eh, I'd be inclined to think the exact opposite given the reshoots and the track record of this director. I mean, they've admitted to not working with a finished script, even. That's never a good sign.

I do get why people are feeling that way and I can admit that as a Star Wars fan I'm in the same boat as most of you. I want to see something different and I knew damn well that TFA would be anything but, so I've had far more excitement for this movie than that one.

Funny enough, the retread aspect of The Force Awakens wasn't as problematic as I thought it would be and didn't harm the film on a quality level. But as a Star Wars fan? I don't think there was a single scene that really excited me and the most emotion I got out of it was laughing at some of the better jokes. I'm slowly making my way through the rest of the new canon and I can say that I got less out of TFA than I get out of the rest of this material. The movie that launched the Clone Wars television show was complete garbage and had nothing really interesting going on, but other than that, I think TFA is probably the next worse in terms of Star Wars excitement, mind blowing new stuff, etc. Those prequel films may have seem amateurishly scripted and painfully wooden, but there was so much more artistic merit and excitement in sections of those things...

I think the end result is that Rogue One will be shittier as a movie but have far more cool stuff for the Star Wars geek. Personally, I would prefer the quality (especially being a film snob), but if this thing sucks and has like five cool scenes, I sure as hell will daydream about cool Rogue One stuff. I've really never even spent a second thinking about TFA ever since watching it and have no reason to ever sit through it again. It was a serviceable space movie without any major flaws but little to love - about on par with Guardians of the Galaxy.
 
Gareth Edwards track record? You mean making the best blockbuster of the past five years? Yeah no hope for him. Monsters is pretty great too.
 
I'd take Interstellar, Looper, Guardians and yes TFA over Godzilla. And a whole lot of other stuff.
 
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Godzilla is great but with some serious flaws, mostly coming from the performances. Kickass dude and Liz Olsen were wretched, whilst they killed off their best assets early on. Seriously, why hire Julliette Binoche for 5 minutes of story time? Ken Watanabe's scenes also fell flat, unfortunately, but Cranston did good work.

But the decision to keep the focus tightly on the human struggles with the kaiju action playing out in the background led to some gorgeous compositions, especially the 2 on 1 finale. It allowed the ultimate death blow with Godzilla wrenching open its opponent jaws and energy blasting it to Hell to have so much more impact than anything in Pacific Rim. What a great capper in a big budget FX film. Ultimately, this great direction in a flawed film is worth more than anything the likes of Marvel have put out (yet to see Civil War).

Not a fan of Interstellar and felt Guardians went completely paint by numbers in the final third. Love Looper and pumped for Johnson's Ep VIII, but it's too low key to be in the same group as the rest. I would however put Tintin forward as one of the best action films this decade.
 
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Metacritic:

Monsters - 63/100
Godzilla - 62/100
Monsters: Dark Continent - 42/100


He directs and produces completely middling fare.


By comparison, Rian Johnson has put out two highly noteworthy movies that I loved Brick (72/100) and Looper (84/100) along with another piece that had its share of proponents, The Brothers Bloom (55/100).
 
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So, I finally saw TFA last night. Yes, it took me eight months, sue me. I've wanted to watch it really badly for a long time, just hadn't gotten around to it until now.

I liked it a lot. It felt like it took place in the same galaxy as the OT, whereas the prequels felt like they took place in a sort of cartoonish version of that galaxy. There's a grittiness here that was absent in the prequels, imo. The action sequences, both the space battles and the saber duals, are fantastic. Just super, super fun to watch. I thought the opening with the First Order attacking that settlement on Jakko was highly effective and visually incredibly exciting. It immediately set the tone of the film and made it feel like kin to the OT. The final light saber battle is perhaps in the best the saga has seen since the Qui-gon/Obi-Wan/Darth Maul "dual of the fates" in TPM(though I don't think anything can top that one in terms of choreography and visual appeal), it was beautiful. I could go on.

I've read the criticisms of some here about how elements of the plot are recycled and how the filmmakers played it safe and gave fan service and all of that, and it's pretty much true, but I don't care. I don't view it as a negative.

With the original films, especially ANH and ESB, there's a simplicity to the plots that give a certain buoyancy to the action, whereas the plot of the prequels was much more complex(some of it necessarily so, what with having to tell the story of how a republic turns into an empire, but some of it not so necessary), to the point where the films arguably got bogged down by it. To delve even a little deeper, the OT was high fantasy. The prequels, I believe, aspired to add actual sci-fi elements into the fantasy, to very mixed reaction. For TFA, the filmmakers very obviously wanted to return to the more broad-stroke storytelling of the OT - a plot as simple as 'The Resistance, led by Leia and Han and joined by new characters, races the First Order, led by Kylo Ren, to find Luke, who disappeared after the new Jedi were wiped out' - and to a fantasy palette less polluted with sci-fi aspirations that a large percentage of fans didn't necessarily want anyway.

Now, like I said, some of that complexity of plot and detail-oriented-ness was necessary in order to tell the story of the Republic turning into the Empire. But when telling this story, the post-OT story, when so many fans have a bad taste in their mouth from the prequels, going minimalist with the plot was the right decision. It was a palette cleanser, and it allowed people to come back to the franchise and just buckle in for a really fun, propulsive, thrilling ride, to just sit back and feel the impact of the thing without having to think too much. And in the end, the Star Wars films have always been more about emotion and less about incisive thought. Good vs Evil. The human condition. Which brings me to this...

The thing that really stood out to me was that the new lead characters - Rey, Finn, Kylo - were so relateable on a human level, whereas in the prequels, the same couldn't really be said for Anakin or even Padme. They all have their own struggles and motivations. Finn's conscience wouldn't let him kill for the first order and he wants to redeem himself for the actions he did carry out. Rey continuously feels pulled back to Jakku because...we're not sure, she was waiting for someone relating to how she ended up there in the first place, and struggles between that instinct and the desire to develop her skills, see where they take her, and be part of something bigger. Even Kylo, in his unmasked moments, is revealed to have a genuine bitterness towards his parents for things as yet unknown, and yet clearly also still feels something for Han when he sees him. I feel like these characters have a sort of depth that was sorely lacking in too many of the prequel characters.

I was impressed with Adam Driver. He only had like ten minutes or something unmasked, but in that ten minutes he managed to convey the whole gifted-jedi-turned-bad-with-a-tormented-soul thing with more nuance, more menace, more gravitas than Christensen was able to in two full films. Whereas Anakin came off too emo, like a 13 year old, whining to everyone about how he'd been wronged with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer, Kylo comes off as an adult, and his expressions of anger and/or pain(like his encounter with Han) and/or fear(like when he realized he couldn't jedi-mind-trick Rey) are quieter, more pensive, and suggest internal conflict, and that there is more to him beneath the surface, which is a feeling I never really got about Anakin. Driver's performance is the kind of performance the character of Anakin deserved in the prequels.

BTW, it may seem like I'm piling on Hayden here, but to be clear, while I generally don't like his performances in AOTC and ROTS, I don't really blame him either. I don't think he's a bad actor, I just think he was miscast and then handicapped with poor direction and poor dialog. None of that is his fault. So on that note, I also have to give the TFA writers credit here, for making Driver's Kylo already more interesting than Christensen's Anakin.

It may also seem like I hate the prequels. I don't. I just recognize the flaws in them and appreciate TFA's attempts to not make the same mistakes.

Anyway, I really liked the film. The one thing I didn't love was
Han's death
. I had somehow managed to go eight months without being spoiled about that, so I was genuinely surprised when it happened. Like everyone, I love Han, and I was bummed when it happened. I'm not sure why they did it. Some say Ford wanted it that way, but he's apparently going to be in Episode VIII(in flashbacks I guess), so that would make less sense. Anyway, if it had to happen, at least it happened in a most Shakespearean manner, with
son killing father
.

I very much enjoyed it and am looking forward to Rogue One, Episode VIII, and beyond. Will definitely pick up the 3D blu-ray when it's released in November.
 
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As someone who watches a lot of films and has seen more than practically anybody that uses this forum, I can say that Hayden Christensen did about as good as you could possibly expect given the circumstances. Dude gets too much flack from people that generally don't know better.

Jake Lloyd was a shitty child actor just like most of them though. His performance is the single worst element of all of these movies.
 
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