Star Wars: The Rise of Spoilers and Speculation

[Deleted member 13524]

Hux's speech at the Starkiller base represents an oppressive militarized dictatorship.
You could say it was taken from a recording of a Hitler speech, but you could also say it was taken from one of Stalin, Kim Jong-Il, Mao Tse-Tung, Fidel Castro and others.

Palpatine turned the Republic into a militarized empire under the pretext of Order and Peace. The First Order grew from the remnants of the Empire who were the most extremist about the order ideals.
It alludes to the Third Reich as much as it alludes to the Khmer Rouge.

Besides, is there any reason why movie directors should avoid similarities between fictional regimes and real-life ones?



And yeah, Rey's perfection is IMO the worst part of the film. Every men around her are full of flaws (hence 1000x more interesting), yet I worry that she may become this model of Token Female Lead of this new era of Political Correctness in media.
It's like everything she does must be perfect:

- Run into a random droid? Refuse an offer ~150 days of food supplies for it because she must be a very honorable person despite being left alone on that planet for a dozen years.
- Face some random muggers? Kick their asses with a stick.
- Fly the Millennium Falcon for the first time, without a co-pilot? Outmaneuver two or three TIE Fighters with a ship that's 5x as big.
- Millennium Falcon won't go to Hyper-space? Fix HyperDrive in a manner of seconds.
- Hold a blaster for the first time? Shoot down a dozen of Stormtroopers while running from them in the jungle.
- Kylo Ren doing mind trick on her? Instantly reverse the mind trick to read his mind instead
- Kylo Ren trying to force pull Anakin's lightsaber? Wins Kylo Ren at first try with the force pull.
- Wielding a lightsaber for the first time? Beat the crap out of Kylo Ren.


I did try to rationalize all this by theorizing that she is a product of Force Conception like Anakin, which is why she is so powerful with the Force and is able to do all this. However although the actor was pretty terrible, the writers did portray Anakin as imperfect and he had to deal with failure at times.
But Rey? She probably shits bricks made of solid gold too.

I do hope the writers will at least explain why she's so perfect and powerful in the following movies. Otherwise it's just bad writing.

 

[Pixel]

Who would win in a pure melee combat duel?

Kylo Ren or this guy?

Consider that Kylo struggled to gain the upper hand vs Finn, yet this Storm Trooper handed Finn his ass.

Intimidating villians are important.

 

[Arwin]

Agreed, but the order matters a lot. This battle is the first time he uses the light saber.

 

[I.S.T.]

I wonder if Finn will end up a lot like Grievius, where he's a competent light saber dude, but utterly incapable of Force shenanigans.

 

[BRiT]

I wonder if Finn will end up a lot like Grievius, where he's a competent light saber dude, but utterly incapable of Force shenanigans.

Well theres still time for him to have freak accident and be put into a cyborg body with more arms.

 

[Chris Lux]

Well theres still time for him to have freak accident and be put into a cyborg body with more arms.

Who knows... all we know is that he has a seriously sliced spine at the moment.

 

[DJ12]

If Rey turns out to be Luke's daughter it all makes perfect sense, Leia had the force but it's no where near as strong as Luke.

She had to be told Luke was her brother, Luke sensed it himself but didn't connect the dots until obi wan mentioned he had a sister. Plus she had been brought up as a princess wanting fit nothing while Luke was probably using his force 'skills' well before he met obi. He was already a great pilot despite only driving a speeder. The bullshit mythology is already there if she is Luke's spawn.

Plus it's possible Luke bred with another force user (a savoir off the galaxy groupie) too giving Rey twice the force genes.

Or maybe growing up on your own on a desert planet makes you much stronger in the force. I guess Ben grew up with a silver spoon in his mouth before he became kylo so he's not really built up the motivation in his youth.

Who knows, it's just bullshit, but if they keep the bullshit enjoyable like this movie I don't really care. No one watches star wars for it's cohesive plot or scientifically plausible story lines and technology.

 

[Mariner]

Just watched the movie and, as expected, it was full of really dumb shit. Entirely expected from Abrams, but still a bit disappointing to see some of the more obvious sharp edges hadn't been knocked off. It wouldn't even have affected the storyline (such as it was) to make one or two changes and make it a little more sensible.

P.S. Note to evil overlords everywhere. If you have an all but indestructable super-weapon which has one weak point, please make at least a modicum of effort to protect the weak point. Super stupid. Oh, agree about the moronic emo Solo Jnr as well. If you're going to have a sinister super-villain, make sure he's not a complete wimp who loses a fight with somebody who has never seen a light-sabre before.

 

[eastmen]

If Rey turns out to be Luke's daughter it all makes perfect sense, Leia had the force but it's no where near as strong as Luke.

She had to be told Luke was her brother, Luke sensed it himself but didn't connect the dots until obi wan mentioned he had a sister. Plus she had been brought up as a princess wanting fit nothing while Luke was probably using his force 'skills' well before he met obi. He was already a great pilot despite only driving a speeder. The bullshit mythology is already there if she is Luke's spawn.

Plus it's possible Luke bred with another force user (a savoir off the galaxy groupie) too giving Rey twice the force genes.

Or maybe growing up on your own on a desert planet makes you much stronger in the force. I guess Ben grew up with a silver spoon in his mouth before he became kylo so he's not really built up the motivation in his youth.

Who knows, it's just bullshit, but if they keep the bullshit enjoyable like this movie I don't really care. No one watches star wars for it's cohesive plot or scientifically plausible story lines and technology.

The problem is luke always needs someone else to help him win. To save the princess it took the whole crew including Ben dieing. To blow up the death star he needed to be rescued by han. In empire han has to save his life on hoth. At cloud City Leia and Lando had to save him. During Return , his father has to save him.

With Rey no one has to save her , she saves them. She saves bb8 , she gets the ship flying and saves Finn , then disables to posion and saves them again. On the the ship with han she frees the squid type monsters , then saves fin by closing a door at the last second , she then saves them all by disabling something in the falcon. The list goes on and on.

I think that's the big problem with Rey's character , they wanted to make a Feminest Icon but made her way to cartoony.

I could relate to look as a young kid, who can really relate to the perfect Rey ?

 

[Pixel]

The main script writer is in his 60s. By nearly every neurological/physiological marker there is a decline. There is a reason why the vast majority of entrepreneurs, countless artists, authors and other content creators create their best achievements in their 20s-40s (usually 30s and 40s). When he wrote the screenplay for Empire Strikes back he was 32.

 

[Chris Lux]

Just watched the movie and, as expected, it was full of really dumb shit. Entirely expected from Abrams, ....

For me the only thing Abrams did wrong was not to use off the shelf bar-code scanners in the Falcons cockpit...

 

[3dilettante]

The problem is luke always needs someone else to help him win. To save the princess it took the whole crew including Ben dieing. To blow up the death star he needed to be rescued by han. In empire han has to save his life on hoth. At cloud City Leia and Lando had to save him. During Return , his father has to save him.

With Rey no one has to save her , she saves them. She saves bb8 , she gets the ship flying and saves Finn , then disables to posion and saves them again. On the the ship with han she frees the squid type monsters , then saves fin by closing a door at the last second , she then saves them all by disabling something in the falcon. The list goes on and on.

I think that's the big problem with Rey's character , they wanted to make a Feminest Icon but made her way to cartoony.

I could relate to look as a young kid, who can really relate to the perfect Rey ?

To a significant extent, I suspect that even if Rey were a guy it would turn out mostly the same.
The major exception would be requiring Rey save herself from her lockup, as I'm sure Abrams and Kasdan wanted to avoid falling back to an pure damsel in distress trope.

I think the problem is more universal than Rey, with a movie that is narratively bottlenecked by having to follow the wrapup from Jedi and the demands of a soft-reboot and some long-standing habits on the part of Abrams.
A problem that exists in a feedback loop to Abram's cribbing so much from the original trilogy is a lack of dynamic range along various axes like time, space, and characters. There's very little breathing room in the Star Trek reboot spatially or temporally, and the overdrive applied to the characters happens in Episode 7.

Nobody important is really allowed to be anything less than an inhuman, knowledgeable, and immortal* badass (barring one exception), not just Rey. There really isn't a strong analogue to Luke's naive farm boy in this movie, and this movie's pacing doesn't leave room to be a fish out of water or to learn from a wise mentor--there's no time.

The original trilogy had the Luke, Han, and Lea core.
Re is the apparent Luke, minus being naive or out of his depth. She's a hard-edged survivor with no innocence to lose.
Po is the apparent Han+Wedge Antilles apparently (in order to lift Luke's X-Wing exploits that only get used in Episode 4 to something useful long-term).
Fin could have been a fish out of water, given his sequestered life, but he's not. He's not an innocent character, given his motivations, and in some ways his mix of emotional artifice and then going out on a limb for a friend is almost closer to Leia in Empire and Jedi, plus some of Luke's skepticism in Empire.

Re goes from 0 to 60 in Jedi terms in like 20 minutes, where we really operate close to 40 at a minimum. She manages to perform all the things associated with Jedi across all three original movies (skilled lightsaber combat, seeing the future, mind control, pulling things with the force). Granted, the original movies are actually not that good about showing this progression, either, but it was at least narratively spread out. Whether this is a constraint of not having faith that the audience can take not getting all the whiz-bang action in just one movie, or Abrams' lack of judiciousness in cribbing from all three movies is unclear.
She can engineer the Falcon's problems while she's at it--probably because Kasdan and Harrison Ford were long-gunning for Han and the movie needed someone to bond with the new Obi-Wan figure.

Po is an inhumanly good pilot, he basically does stuff that both cribs from the Death Star run and all the pilots' kill counts in the rest of the movies. He or one of this squadron mates is an inhumanely good X-Wing shot since they manage to snipe the storm troopers guarding Han and Fin without killing them--despite showing ten seconds earlier that those starfighter shots blow up like artillery rounds against the forward positions. For the purposes of keeping everything in frame when the X-Wings come to the rescue, Po manages to do insanely fast turns with insane accuracy against a string of tie fighters--lest he actually have to do some real maneuvering.
His friendship with Fin goes from minor acquaintanceship to Han and Luke's bro-hugs after the first Death Star run.

Fin is a cloistered trooper whose life mirrors a sort of Ancient Sparta lifetime as a soldier, who is bumped up to being highly proficient and adaptable enough to wield a Jedi weapon he's never seen before. He starts off fearful and resentful, and then transitions to willing to cross the (compressed) galaxy to save Re. Then he knows the schematic and geographic layout of a station that probably wasn't his business, and then there's the throwaway joke about him being a janitor--like you'd waste an elite trooper on mop work.

Han Solo is inhumanly badass as well. He's a much better shot generally than he ever was (shoots someone I can't tell he actually even looked at), and he manually hyperspaces in two different situations that are probably up there with Luke's using the force in his trench run.

Kylo Ren, other than possibly being the doof in the movie, is inconsistently handled in terms of skill. He's handicapped at various points, but it's hard to imagine how someone who managed to take out a whole Jedi academy could falter enough to have trouble with two people who hadn't even held a lightsaber beyond a combined 40 seconds.

There's no room between total noob and grognard.

Spatially, the whole setting with hyperspeed and all appears to be about the size of a small town. Everyone can see everything, something even the kind of iffy on distance original movies never got that bad at. It's closer to Abrams' problems with how to visually show what happened with Vulcan in the first Star Trek reboot, and then the poor handling in the second.
Apparently the super-secret Star Killer station is right next door to a resistance base of indeterminate importance, and could visibly destroy the seat of a republic that the movie did not define and apparently all of a fleet we didn't really know existed.
The Death Star of the week is just there, and Han even lampshades how perfunctory this particular macguffin is. It also apparently has only a few shots before it's useless? Also, I think Abrams cribbed the Vulcan destruction visual from his prior movie for part of that one.

Time-wise, everything is a few minutes apart, and there's also a lot of loading up of emotional points near the end that I would say Episode 4 handled better. Cramming a Kenobi, trench run, destruction of Alderaan (that nobody actually has established a reason to care about, just you know, five of them at once), then a quick jump to find the Luke Ken-Yoda at the very end again shows a lack of range.

One thing that was inherited from the prequels and partly from Jedi is the fetishization around lightsabers, or one in particular. People start doing visually neat if stupid things around them, and the lack of dynamic range between expert and novice might be why they added a Fin versus Stormtrooper (who should have just shot him) saber fight, because it would have looked even more ridiculous that he didn't die 1 second into his faceoff with Ren.
Another thing inherited from the prequels is that apparently R2 is a douche.

That's not to say that I didn't find the movie fun in various parts on a first viewing. Most of the performances seemed much more natural than prior movies, and visually I think it's more interesting than the prequels--even excluding all the visual vocabulary ripped from the original trilogy.
I think I can see why a lot of this was done, and the tighter--if possibly rushed--pacing is better than the prequels.

I have questions of where they can go, since this movie also really pushed to stakes to silly territory, and Abrams took so many of the good scenes from the good movies already.

If Fin is the new Leia, Po the new Han, and Re the new Luke, the love triangle would be a bit different.

 

[eastmen]

I disagree , I think Finn is the new Luke and it will turn out he is a force user also. He is the only one in the movie to actually make mistakes.

I think that Rey has to be the new Han. The only time Han failed is when he forgot to put himself before his friends and take care of his bounty.

I also think Finn and the Silver tropper are going to be an item in the next movies.

 

[Mariner]

Oddly enough, one of the pretty inconsequential things which grated for me was Rey's accent. The actress, Daisy Ridley, is incredibly well-spoken with a cut-glass upper class English accent - hyper-posh, so to speak. She is somebody who has obviously been brought up in a very comfortable background and will have been surrounded by similarly well-off people, hence the accent. Because of this, she never once convinced me that she was a scavenger who had scrabbled to survive on a harsh planet since being abandoned at a young age.

I understand this is my own biases at work and non-English people might not realise how 'posh' she was. Nothing against her performance - she did the whole intense staring and sweating thing well, I suppose - but it did make me suspend my disbelief even further!

 

[Alexko]

Oddly enough, one of the pretty inconsequential things which grated for me was Rey's accent. The actress, Daisy Ridley, is incredibly well-spoken with a cut-glass upper class English accent - hyper-posh, so to speak. She is somebody who has obviously been brought up in a very comfortable background and will have been surrounded by similarly well-off people, hence the accent. Because of this, she never once convinced me that she was a scavenger who had scrabbled to survive on a harsh planet since being abandoned at a young age.

I understand this is my own biases at work and non-English people might not realise how 'posh' she was. Nothing against her performance - she did the whole intense staring and sweating thing well, I suppose - but it did make me suspend my disbelief even further!

Maybe she was raised by down-on-their-luck aristocrats.

 

[London Geezer]

Oddly enough, one of the pretty inconsequential things which grated for me was Rey's accent. The actress, Daisy Ridley, is incredibly well-spoken with a cut-glass upper class English accent - hyper-posh, so to speak. She is somebody who has obviously been brought up in a very comfortable background and will have been surrounded by similarly well-off people, hence the accent. Because of this, she never once convinced me that she was a scavenger who had scrabbled to survive on a harsh planet since being abandoned at a young age.

I understand this is my own biases at work and non-English people might not realise how 'posh' she was. Nothing against her performance - she did the whole intense staring and sweating thing well, I suppose - but it did make me suspend my disbelief even further!

True. She is the Kate Middleton of the Jedi.

 

[nutball]

Oddly enough, one of the pretty inconsequential things which grated for me was Rey's accent. The actress, Daisy Ridley, is incredibly well-spoken with a cut-glass upper class English accent - hyper-posh, so to speak.

Really? She sounds distinctly Sarf Lundun to my ear. Certainly not cut glass at least.

 

[Mariner]

You must have been listening to a different actress than I was! Apparently she went to an independent performing arts school with fees of more than 30k per year so I think it's a safe bet to assume she comes from a rather well-off background!

 

[Laa-Yosh]

Ooookay, first thing first - I like the new movie .
I wasn't super impressed after the first viewing; but I've found that it has grown on me, it has plenty of scenes that are memorable and strong and well executed. More on the general narrative later.

I like the visuals a lot - even with all the obvious homages, and the not so obvious but painfully crafted details, it still has a lot of new things to offer. It is in some ways a shame and in other ways a triumph, that based on all the publicity about "practical effects", most people have no idea about the sheer scope or the complexity of the VFX involved. I'll try to post a video about this stuff soon.

One of the most interesting issues for me was when the ILM asset sup talks about the CGI Falcon. The point is that there is no such thing as "the Falcon" in all of the SW movies - there are at least 3 different practical models, up to 3 different practical exterior sets, the old CGI Falcon in the Special Editions, and of course the interior sets. Fun fact: none of the practical exteriors can ever be matched to the interior sets, it's impossible to fit that stuff into them. So the ILM guys had to build a new CG Falcon that was able to capture the - no better word here - spirit of the various practical elements from the previous movies, in a single new incarnation. I can completely believe that they've spent two years on getting the shade of gray for the outer hull right. It must have been a painful, exhaustive, time consuming but ultimately rewarding experience.
And this is probably also a pretty good summary of what had to be an ongoing challenge for practically all the visual elements, from Solo's jacket through the new stormtroopers and X-wings to the lightsaber FX. Fortunately it looks to me like no-one's questioning the achievements of the crew; even though it may be somewhat under appreciated

I really, really liked Kylo Ren even after the first viewing, I think this character is one of the biggest highlights of the movie. I do understand that he comes off as a brat; but on the one hand, that was the point. He's an emotionally conflicted, undeveloped personality, nothing like the Vader of the old trilogy; but on the other hand he's already a lot better than Anakin was.
The high point IMHO is that he makes a really conscious choice to become evil. We haven't seen that with Palpatine, and it was a mess with Anakin, no clear intentions or motivations or anything. It may be hyperbole but this reminds me of Richard III's decision: "I am determined to prove a villain, / And hate the idle pleasures of these days."
I think it is pretty rare to see a pop culture villain going through this first step; almost all the characters are already determined and far too committed when they're introduced. And I also think that the actor has managed to sell the whole thing quite well.

Rey is quite a lot more complex and mysterious at this point, so I'd rather wait to see Episode VIII before jumping to conclusions. It's pretty damn clear though, that they're trying very hard to set up some large scale stuff for her in the next two episodes. I'd say they have a very good foundation to build upon; and not just for her, but for the other characters as well. I'm actually really happy with the new characters; Phasma is of course a weak point now, but I imagine there are some plans for her as well.


As for the rest of the movie, there are a few factors I think we need to consider.
First, it seems like Abrams and Kasdan had very little time to get the whole thing together - they've fired the original screen writer about 2 years ago and probably started from almost nothing. The movie had to be delayed by about 6 months to accommodate them and there's image evidence that Kasdan was still writing while they were already shooting on sets. All the pressure has to be pretty evident as well, and thus it made a lot of sense to summon a lot of the original movies' spirits and thematic elements. I can also see a lot of attempts where they were trying to subvert the story of New Hope, but eventually failed to do so - with a little more time, things could have ended up being a lot better...


The other thematic aspect is how this movie can, and may actually consciously try to, fit into the existing Star Wars saga. I've happened upon a pretty interesting essay on the first six movies, which is just far too elaborate to condense in a few sentences:
http://www.starwarsringtheory.com
A lot of this is of course speculation - but there's a lot of evidence in what Lucas has been talking about the prequels, and how they relate to the original trilogy. I won't spoil anything, but it's pretty hard to argue with the stuff in here (although I can't fully agree with some of the final conclusions).

Basically, it appears that George Lucas had a quite large scale vision about how all his SW movies should fit together, using a pretty old and incredibly complicated story structure (mostly used in antique writings and ancient mythology) that goes way beyond the traditional three-act structure.
Now Disney has employed both Kathleen Kennedy and Lawrence Kasdan, both very closely involved with Lucas and Star Wars - so it makes sense to presume that they're also familiar with the intents of Lucas. If they are trying to create a new trilogy that fits into this structure, then most of Episode VII would absolutely have to be derived from the plots and characters of the old movies. I don't want to try to explain this in a single post, and of course I might be wrong (as well as some other guys who's theories I've read about) but if you read that essay, it does make a lot of sense. The new movies absolutely have to mirror and/or invert certain elements of certain previous movies if they want to fit into this "ring" story structure.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

VFX breakdown

More elaborate interview stuff coming soon