"The Force Awakens" (with SPOILERS)

Good piece here. How will Star Wars recover?

As for the RT reviews (I’m paraphrasing) something like 94 percent were done with a newly created account that was deleted afterward. Hmmm.

As 'The Last Jedi' Nears $600M, Can 'Star Wars' Recover?

 

Saw it tonight. Overall thought it was good. A little long, especially with kids in tow. Action scenes were great.

One thing that I know I just have to accept, and it's true throughout the series, but: The treatment of space as something less than a totally lethal environment drives me mental. There are so many times people are standing right next to doors open to the vacuum of space, or Leia's weird fairy flight in this one... Like, space is cold and has no atmosphere and would kill you dead in a terribly gruesome way in seconds.

Okay, I'm good now. Carry on.

 

Most of that doesn't bother me... but the Leia scene was problematic. I'll fall back on "The Force" for that one, but it could have been done differently while still making her situation look dire.

Like many, I'd guess, I thought they perhaps added that scene after Carrie Fisher's death.

Still not sure how they're going to handle that. They say no CGI. But it's going to be very tricky to give her a proper sendoff in the next flick.

 

I think that was there all along. One of the podcasts I heard this week said that Rian Johnson considered re-editing the film to make that her death scene, but they decided against it because then they'd have had to cut her scene with Luke and a lot of other good stuff as well.

As for the space thing, I think it's been established that most of the ships in the Star Wars universe have some sort of extended atmosphere. Almost all of the huge vessels like the Death Star and the star destroyers have flight decks that are open to space. We saw Vader standing at the end of a corridor looking off into space at the end of Rogue One, and in this one the bombers have their bays open to space while people are inside.
It might not be realistic (and Leia's scene certainly was ridiculous), but if it's a standard in-universe technology you just have to kind of go with it.

 

Benicio del Toro's character summed it up:

"Today they're killing you. Tomorrow, you'll kill them. ... It's all about the money."

 

Yeah, loved that bit. Fits right in with moving away from pure good vs. evil.

Spoiler

Really looking forward to seeing where we go with this. I was definitely a person who thought Rey had to be a Skywalker or a Kenobi or a Palpatine, etc. And that Snoke had to have an deep backstory (he still might).

Now, we have no idea where this can go. That's pretty fun.

 

Why are we taking Kylo Ren's word on Rey's parents? How would he know who they were?

 

They aren’t going to cheat like that, I don’t think. That would be pretty bad storytelling. At some point, the viewer deserves to believe what he’s being told.

 

I wondered that myself. DW’s probably right, but that struck me as an awfully — perhaps deliberately — prosaic reveal ...

 

It would be the third time they played this particular twist - so-and-so is related to so-and-so - and the second time they misled us about it. (From a certain point of view.)

People spent two years speculating about Rey’s origin, though I’m not sure Abrams intended that to happen. It got away from him a bit. Now they told us her origin. Now they are going to reverse course again? No way.

Kylo Ren knows Rey’s origin for the same reason that Darth Vader can stand in open space and the protagonist in”Midnight in Paris” time-traveled each night without explanation. Because.

 

Gotcha.

 

Didn’t Ren also say something like, “You know it’s true.”

I bet the novelization will be even clearer on this.