"The Force Awakens" (with SPOILERS)

I’m coming off more critical than I meant to. I liked it.

 

Agreed on all counts. It absolutely goes down as one of my favorite movie moments and it is clearly right there with any shot in the entire series.

Also, the similar smart-ass lines delivered to Rey, then Kylo, are just fucking perfect.

 

I can't say I agree with you overall, but it's a very interesting take and it reminds me part of why Luke's role in Last Jedi is so polarizing.

I don't think this thematic stuff is too much of a spoiler because I'm not going to reference specific events. I liken the overall theme, demonstrated mainly through Luke, to the difference between faith and religion. The Jedi Order got bogged down in religion, as did Luke at one point, and it led to the destruction of the order and Luke's loss of faith. Luke kept trying to cling to the religion before coming around to find his faith again.

I'm still trying to figure out where I place this one among my favorites in the series. The original still holds a special place for me, which is as much a function of the age I was when I saw it as the quality of the film. It's still in my top two with Empire. At the moment, I'd still put Last Jedi behind Return of the Jedi, but ahead of all the others. I need to see the new one a few more times and digest it properly.

Funny thing is, I have The Force Awakens on the DVR, but I've only watched the whole thing twice. I haven't even watched all of Rogue One a second time even though it is on Netflix. I'm actually tempted to see Last Jedi again in the theater, something I never do, and I can see myself re-watching it many times once it becomes available on DVD, online or on my DVR. (I'm guessing it will be on Disney's streaming service once that is up and running.)

 

It’s almost become a futile exercise for me to rank the films as separate entities. I am s fan of certain storylines and moments.

 

I do both. Thing is, I never tire of watching the original trilogy. I own them on DVD and I still find myself watching when I flip by on cable. Sometimes I just pop the DVD in so I can watch it without commercials.

As I added to my post after you read it, I've only watched The Force Awakens twice. I didn't even finish a second viewing of Rogue One on Netflix. I think Last Jedi is going to be right there with the original trilogy for me in that I'm going to want to keep watching it, but it's tough to say until I actually give that second viewing a go.

The original Star Wars is still the only movie I've ever seen more than once in the theaters. I saw it twice during the original release, then once when they put the remastered version in the theaters in the mid-90s.

 

“Empire” still feels like a special treat to me. It was basically a rumor to me growing up. I’d seen “Jedi” in the theater and “Star Wars” we recorded from TV. To this day, when I see “Empire,” it feels like I stumbled upon a rarity.

 

I think Burnenko can be totally hit or miss as a writer. Some of his rants are enjoyable, some are nails on a chalkboard. But this list of all the ways TLJ tears down stuff that came before it was great.

Spoiler

• When Supreme Leader Snoke owned Kylo Ren for being a lame Darth Vader cosplayer, literally called his helmet ridiculous, and told him to take it off.
• When Kylo Ren, fed up with the burden of giving the new series a Darth Vader of its very own, smashed his helmet to hell and left its shattered remains on the floor.
• When Rey resolved the cliffhanger ending of The Force Awakens by handing Luke Skywalker his father’s long-lost blue lightsaber, and he responded by chucking it over his shoulder like a crumpled-up cheeseburger wrapper and walking away.
• When Luke milked the four ruddy teats of the big gross elephant walrus thing, turned to the camera, and took a nice big gross swig of its blue-green milk, the grossest and most off-putting possible fan-service callback to the blue-green beverage Aunt Beru served with dinner back in the original Star Wars.
• When Luke, explaining to Rey why the Jedi Order has to end for all time, all but looked directly at the screen and said, Because the stupid prequels revealed them to be the most worthless group of dumbass motherfuckers in the history of the universe, and since we must treat those awful movies as Star Wars canon, that forces us to repudiate the Jedi for all time.
• When Luke described the Force to Rey entirely without mentioning sub-atomic particles.
• When Kylo Ren chopped Snoke in half like halfway through the movie, foreclosing with extreme prejudice on The Force Awakens’s suggestion that this trilogy would just run back the entire Luke-Vader-Palpatine dynamic from the original trilogy.
• When the big reveal explaining Kylo Ren’s turn toward the Dark Side turned out to be that he woke up in the middle of the night to the sight of a crazy-eyed Luke Skywalker about to murder him in his sleep.
• When Luke, with scorn dripping off every word, derisively referred to the lightsaber—probably Star Wars’ most iconic creation—as a “laser sword.”
• When Kylo Ren, with like ten seconds of icily savage dialogue, revealed that Rey’s parents were nobody-ass losers, pissing on both George Lucas’s sole storytelling move and all The Force Awakens’s hints about Rey having a mysterious and auspicious background.
  • When Anakin Skywalker’s lightsaber snapped in half.
  • When Princess Leia and Admiral Holdo both rebuked Poe Dameron for his reliance on insanely costly and self-destructive long-shot suicide missions as a method for winning a war against a much larger and infinitely more powerful adversary.
  • When they restored the “stun” function to the blasters that everyone had forgotten about since stormtroopers used it on Princess Leia in the opening minutes of the first movie, even though it would have made everyone’s lives much easier throughout all the other movies.
  • When the movie’s Han Solo-ish Enigmatic Rogue character, DJ, revealed himself not to have a secret heart of gold, but a not-secret-at-all heart of callous self-interest, and he sold the good guys out to the bad guys because the bad guys could pay him more.
  • When the long-shot suicide mission to retrieve a MacGuffin not only failed, but failed in such a way that it made things incalculably worse for the good guys and led directly to unknown numbers of faceless Resistance fighters dying meaningless deaths in the cold void of space.
  • When a smiling Ghost Yoda gleefully incinerated the holy chapel of the Jedi religion and (as far as Luke knew) all its sacred texts, and was all, Whatever man, it’s cool, just let the youths cook, it’s their turn.
  • When Ghost Yoda told Luke that his Jedi knowledge of the Force was not as useful to Rey as his crusty-old-fart knowledge of what it’s like to fuck up and fail a lot, implicitly shrugging off the original trilogy’s focus on the supreme importance of receiving proper Jedi training.
  • When Luke explicitly said, I am not just going to turn up with a lightsaber and face down the entire army of bad guys, even though that’s exactly what Luke would have done in the original trilogy—like when he waltzed into Jabba the Hutt’s palace armed with nothing but an extremely half-cocked plan and a lightsaber in Return of the Jedi—and pretty much exactly what Leia asked Obi-Wan Kenobi to do in the hologram message that kicked off the plot of the original Star Wars.
  • When Luke then showed up with a lightsaber and stood alone against the entire army of bad guys anyway, and literally everyone watching the movie went, “He’s doing the shit! He’s facing down the entire army of bad guys!” and then, duh, of course that’s not what he was doing, he literally told you he wasn’t going to do that, because that would be foolish.
  • When what he was actually doing nevertheless turned out to be cooler and more satisfying than that anyway, and it was like, dang, actually you can tell a fresh and surprising story in this Star Wars universe after all, instead of just repeating previous stories over and over again forever.
  • The Broom Child, just some random-ass kid doing the Force to a broomstick and imagining it’s a lightsaber, which somehow works simultaneously as a giant finger in the eye to the series’s heretofore relentlessly inward-turning mythology and baits fan-nerds to own themselves by missing the point and speculating about who this kid’s secret parents might be.

The more I think about, the whole movie is thumbing its nose at Lucas and fanboys and the various tropes that some fans just want to see recycled over and over while still complaining that they don't live up to the originals. This was the only way out for this film, the only way the series could move beyond crawling up inside it's own ass again.

 

Speaking of thumbing a nose at fanbois...

Spoiler

The Leia scene made me think "I bet that's how Lady Stoneheart would've moved."

 

This is great!

 

I disagree with your takeaway somewhat in that I don't think the filmmakers were thumbing their noses at the fanbois*, but as I noted upthread, they were telling the audience not to take things so seriously. I thought they managed to do so - intentionally - without coming off as condescending to the people who really take this mythology to heart. They just told the audience to pump the brakes a bit.

That said, I love a lot of the points that were made there. Fun article to read, thanks for posting.

*proper SJ style

 

Went to see The Last Jedi yesterday and enjoyed it. Not as much as some of the others (I liked Rogue One more), but it was pretty good.
Dark, though.

Spoiler: Spoilers

They detonated or paid off so many lingering storylines from The Force Awakens that I wonder where they go from here. The entirety of the galactic rebellion can now fit inside the Millennium Falcon, so how do they realistically fight the First Order? And why fight, instead of just blending into society and living their lives, after the rest of the galaxy told them to piss off?
This is the first time in the history of the franchise that the war has, for all intents and purposes, been over. It'll be at least a generation before they can build a credible army to fight the First Order, so will there be a massive time jump for Episode IX? Or will Episode IX focus almost entirely on the Rey/Kylo storyline, wrap it up, and we start with a totally clean slate in Episode X?

A couple of other things I liked and thoughts:
• Luke winking at C-3P0 right before the final battle. It was kind of a funny moment, but if you watch close it was also a hint as to what was actually going on with Luke. When Evil BB-8 saw Finn and Rose on the star destroyer, it detected them with his sensors. Presumably, C-3PO did the same with Luke and the wink was a way of telling him to keep it under wraps.
• I enjoyed the Porgs, dammit. They look like my dog. Fanbois would have complained about them no matter what, too. They have about 30 seconds total of screen time and play no role in the plot whatsoever, and they're just there to sell toys. They do something important and they're the new Ewoks. Fanbois suck.
• There was a definite Battlestar Galactica vibe (the first couple episodes) with the slow speed chase through the cosmos.
• What is the deal with Captain Phasma? Is she supposed to be a badass? Because so far she's this trilogy's Boba Fett -- someone who looks cool, the Fanbois think is cool, but who regularly gets shown to look like a chump.
• I thought R2-D2 got deactivated in The Force Awakens? Did they go buy a charger from the gas station for him?
• Speaking of R2-D2, we're running out of legacy characters now, right? R2, C-3PO and Chewie are about all that's left. Leia obviously won't be around next time. I guess we'll still see Luke in a smaller role, but that original cast is getting whittled down fast.
• Finally, Admiral Ackbar deserved a better death. Certainly more than a dropped line of dialogue.

 

Batman, I think there is one prominent character left who hasn't had a cameo, and I really thought he was going to be the hacker in the casino:

Spoiler

Landdddooooo. Billy Dee Williams is 80, though, so I don't think he can do much heavy lifting if he is in a future installment.