Movies STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS v.9 (Dragonlord's Review)

He'll be fine. I can see him shoving Finn and Rey's heads up their asses in the next film (although it'll be hard to match the asskicking he laid on Finn in TFA). Snoke will complete his training and he'll come back with a vengeance.
 
You are 100% correct ** but fanboys will fight you to the death over it. JJ fucked up on so many levels. Don't worry, it will become inevitable when they realize they cannot keep re-watching the movie like the original.

**in your opinion
 
I wonder whether Kylo Ren can even be redeemed after getting Aldo'd. He certainly lost his aura of terror and the all round coolness of his character at the end of the movie.

I don't think even a lightsaber shaped like a flying shark will help him leave a similar impression to what he did in his introduction scene, which is one of my favourites throughout all the movies.
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I'm back at work so I don't have much time.

I feel I accurately summarized your position when I said you were upset because this movie wasn't exactly what YOU wanted it to be. I'm going to say I'm really happy it wasn't the boring, template film you would have preferred.

Any time you say a character SHOULD have done this or that, you're part of the reason most films are utterly predictable.


You' ve pointed out what you didn't like, and people have shared their opinions on your position.

You don't need to keep hitting people over the head with it.
Well said.
 
His "serious" injury doesn't seem to have had any impact on anything he did during the fight. So no...I wouldn't call that a serious injury. The little blood that was dripping from it? Come one. I've had nose bleeds that bled more. If you wanna sell me that you are hurt, you gotta do more than this periodic thumping on the wound. You gotta sell it whenever you move anything that has to do with the area injured.

So that's on the actor and the director.

Second thing I wanna point out is Ren (unlike Vader) was putting everything in his swings. And Finn was blocking them. That's crap.

This is not "cat and mouse" Kylo Ren is putting far too much effort into his swings for this to look "cat and mouse" or for him to be "injured".

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This is cat and mouse...Vader is using barely any effort here, and Luke goes flying.
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So now what? Just any janitor can pick up a lightsaber and fight with it? You know what would happen if you, an untrained person picked up a lightsaber? You'd be more likley to clip yourself with it, cutting off one of your own appendeges. I mean it's the all mighty coveted light saber for christ sakes. Not just any old sanitation duty storm trooper should be able to pick one up and even look half decent. It's the signature weapon of the heros of this fucking series. So congrats, you demystified the light saber AND jedi training to boot.




Rey's fight was even more bull shit. Here we have our main evil guy, that costume designed a nice scary costume for, and effects designed a new fandangle scary looking light saber with a firey effect, and he get's his shit kicked in in the first film. That's not how this works. So what? They are gonna train him even MORE now? Maybe give him a robotic dick and I'm suddenly suppose to get excited as I watch him inevitably get his ass kicked again? This follows the logic as to how many times can you kill spock and then bring him back to life before the act itself loses all meaning? The answer is once. You can only get away with this shit once until the imagery is used up. So JJ just used up his card of the audience watching both Rey become victorious and finish her arc, and the bad guy getting his shit kicked in.



My bad, I was confused at what you meant by Sidious so I'll straighten out what I mean. Sidious was not the main bad guy in the first three, even though he ranked higher than Vader it was most certainly Vader that had more screen time and story that the audience was connected too and feared and was interested in. Sidious was some unknown dude in a chair. And he wasn't even in the first film.

In this movie, don't play off that the evil hologram, Snoke is the main evil guy. As the movie gave him zero screen time, zero presence and no back story. That's not how this works. Why the FUCK should the audience be invested in a character who's only in the film for less than 5 minutes and has very little dialogue? So once again we spend 2 hours getting to know a main villian, and instead of him getting cut in half and thrown down a shaft like Darth Maul, he turns out to be a big pussy.

So I don't even know if that's a win for the audience, but what I DO know is that the trilogy will have to spend yet ANOTHER 2 hours building up yet ANOTHER bad guy for us, the audience, to get to know and hate. And you can't do that in 5 minutes with a hologram...that's not great story telling. Luke is more the main protagonist, than Snoke is the main antagonist.

Now I'd just like to further reiterate that our main protagonist, Rey got HERSELF out of all danger and situations within this film. Giving the audience zero sense of danger or growth in character progression. Fly the Millennium falcon better than Solo? Sure! Give her five minutes. Learn the force? Sure. Give her 5 seconds. honestly where is the character arc here? She's the same chick at the end of the film that she was at the start. No person taught her anything, no guidance...she just said "force? give me a sec, let me close my eyes". So with this as the base of our main hero...a person who can get herself out of any jam, knows everything, and seems to learn everything else in minutes if not seconds...why the hell should anyone be concerned about her safety? Give her any problem and she will just close her eyes and create the solution.

That's just lazy writing getting your hero out of a jam by going against canon. Kinda like when Lucas put Obiwan and Quigon in a jam at the start of ep1 by giving them force super speed, and then completely abandoning that power for the rest of the films. I'm less curious about Rey's character so much as I am interesting in seeing how the writers try to paint themselves out of this corner without fucking up the canon further.

I can destroy your entire arguments in detail but I got better things to do. What I will say is you seem to want the movie to stick to certain formulas but then complain because the movie instead uses other tropes you don't like.
 
I'm back at work so I don't have much time.

I feel I accurately summarized your position when I said you were upset because this movie wasn't exactly what YOU wanted it to be. I'm going to say I'm really happy it wasn't the boring, template film you would have preferred.

Any time you say a character SHOULD have done this or that, you're part of the reason most films are utterly predictable.

You' ve pointed out what you didn't like, and people have shared their opinions on your position.

You don't need to keep hitting people over the head with it.
Perfect

Funny that BVG keeps accusing the film of being a rehash when he really likes to keep rehashing his beat downs in these threads.
 
right back at ya fella.

with the exception of Ren not being fully trained in the arts, Ren being injured by Chewie, Ren toying with Finn and Finn being a soldier (and not just a 'sanitation worker'), which are all fact, i've never said that my take on the movie was fact.
 
I can destroy your entire arguments in detail but I got better things to do. What I will say is you seem to want the movie to stick to certain formulas but then complain because the movie instead uses other tropes you don't like.

Rules of thumb;

You need an arc for your main protagonist. You want to see them fall, rise up, become better then what they were and then succeed.

Rey did all of this without any help in the first movie already. Hell she did it in 5 seconds for christ sake. Her arc is pretty much complete at this point.

You want to see your villain get conquered in the final act. Again, that happened in the first film.

NO SNOKE IS NOT THE MAIN VILLAIN. He is no more the main villain than Luke is the main protagonist.

You want your villain to be menacing and terrifying and imposing. I think it's safe to say that nobody is scared or terrified of Ren. On the flip side when I was a wee kid and saw Vader at a Star Wars convention, I pissed myself. I was scared of him. He was large, menacing and terrifying. Ren is Dawson creek revised for Star Wars.

dawson-crying-gif.gif


You keep your troupes simple so that people understand the players. You can focus on great story telling that way when you players are less muddy and more clear and their motivations understood.
 
I can destroy your entire arguments in detail but I got better things to do. What I will say is you seem to want the movie to stick to certain formulas but then complain because the movie instead uses other tropes you don't like.

BVG on the other hand has nothing-better-to-do.
 
NO SNOKE IS NOT THE MAIN VILLAIN. He is no more the main villain than Luke is the main protagonist.

Who is? Ren? Or perhaps someone we haven't seen yet who is possibly above Snoke?
 
Who is? Ren? Or perhaps someone we haven't seen yet who is possibly above Snoke?

It's clearly suppose to be Ren.

You can't make your main villain someone who only has 5 minutes of holographic screen time. That's just ridiculous story telling. The emperor wasn't the main villain in 4,5,6...it was Vader.
 
There really was no main villain to vanquish in TFA. It was all set up for the sequels, which I am perfectly fine with.

My wild guess is Kylo will turn to the light side for a while but then betray Rey towards the end. At the end of this trilogy he will be where Anakin left off at ROTS. A real Darth Vader.
 
Rules of thumb;

You need an arc for your main protagonist. You want to see them fall, rise up, become better then what they were and then succeed.

Rey did all of this without any help in the first movie already. Hell she did it in 5 seconds for christ sake. Her arc is pretty much complete at this point.

You want to see your villain get conquered in the final act. Again, that happened in the first film.

NO SNOKE IS NOT THE MAIN VILLAIN. He is no more the main villain than Luke is the main protagonist.

You want your villain to be menacing and terrifying and imposing. I think it's safe to say that nobody is scared or terrified of Ren. On the flip side when I was a wee kid and saw Vader at a Star Wars convention, I pissed myself. I was scared of him. He was large, menacing and terrifying. Ren is Dawson creek revised for Star Wars.

dawson-crying-gif.gif


You keep your troupes simple so that people understand the players. You can focus on great story telling that way when you players are less muddy and more clear and their motivations understood.

As a paid writer myself, I respectfully disagree.

The story 'needs' you outlined are popular plot elements, for sure:
"Hero arcs" are great
"Defeating villains in final act" makes sense as well
"Villain's being terrifying" is another strong move

All of those ^ qualities of storytelling however, belong to the ideological and metanarrative category of film. That's only one area of storytelling and its huge presence film's history provides a major platform for modernist/post-modern/general contemporary writers and other authors to target and chip away at, forming their own unique sculptures from.

It's an important baseline in film and storytelling, but that doesn't make it the "right" way to tell a story.

At the end of "The Bad Seed" (a 1956 film about an evil little girl who kills people and gets away with it) the original script's ending described the little girl walking off into the distance, and onto the next town. It's a chilling image, and it fit the general creepy vibe of the film's blend of sweetness (little girl walking down a road, exploring) with terror (she knows how to manipulate and kill grown-ups) - obviously hollywood wanted no part of that ending, especially in 1956, because holy fucking shit, they didn't want their audiences to start imagining that all their bratty little kids were secretly homicidal monsters.

whome.jpg


...So they changed the ending to a silly scene where lightning strikes a tree and it falls on the girl, crushing her to death. God wins. Evil is conquered. The End. It's a prime example of ideological filmmaking censoring original ideas and deviance from tradition, which was the whole damned point of the origin of storytelling - to be original, and tell an audience something that had never been heard of, before.

So with all due respect, the latest Star Wars would have been just fine if:
The Bad Guys Win
The Characters Have No Arc
The Villain Is Flawed And Unimposing

Because it would have been a different, original story, all the same.

Embrace defiance of metanarrative (the objective seeking of overall themes, purposes, end-to-end relations between characters and actions) and you'll have a story that looks and feels like its own story, and not a rehashing of something familiar (cough cough "New Hope" complaints, cough cough)
 
To say TFA is a rehash of ANH is not really accurate.

It also rehashes ESB (father son confrontation on bridge, unresolved ending with one of the heroes incapacitated) and RotJ (Death Star mission which includes Han leading ground team to disable shields and ships flying inside Death Star to destroy it).
 
As a paid writer myself, I respectfully disagree.

The story 'needs' you outlined are popular plot elements, for sure:
"Hero arcs" are great
"Defeating villains in final act" makes sense as well
"Villain's being terrifying" is another strong move

All of those ^ qualities of storytelling however, belong to the ideological and metanarrative category of film. That's only one area of storytelling and its huge presence film's history provides a major platform for modernist/post-modern/general contemporary writers and other authors to target and chip away at, forming their own unique sculptures from.

It's an important baseline in film and storytelling, but that doesn't make it the "right" way to tell a story.

At the end of "The Bad Seed" (a 1956 film about an evil little girl who kills people and gets away with it) the original script's ending described the little girl walking off into the distance, and onto the next town. It's a chilling image, and it fit the general creepy vibe of the film's blend of sweetness (little girl walking down a road, exploring) with terror (she knows how to manipulate and kill grown-ups) - obviously hollywood wanted no part of that ending, especially in 1956, because holy fucking shit, they didn't want their audiences to start imagining that all their bratty little kids were secretly homicidal monsters.

whome.jpg


...So they changed the ending to a silly scene where lightning strikes a tree and it falls on the girl, crushing her to death. God wins. Evil is conquered. The End. It's a prime example of ideological filmmaking censoring original ideas and deviance from tradition, which was the whole damned point of the origin of storytelling - to be original, and tell an audience something that had never been heard of, before.

So with all due respect, the latest Star Wars would have been just fine if:
The Bad Guys Win
The Characters Have No Arc
The Villain Is Flawed And Unimposing

Because it would have been a different, original story, all the same.

Embrace defiance of metanarrative (the objective seeking of overall themes, purposes, end-to-end relations between characters and actions) and you'll have a story that looks and feels like its own story, and not a rehashing of something familiar (cough cough "New Hope" complaints, cough cough)

Mr Plinkett says it better than I can lol.



But outside of keeping it simple stupid. This isn't some brilliant trail blazing film here considering it has obvious plot holes like r2d2 and that fucking map bullshit.

Sooo I'm of the opinion they should have just stuck with what works, and then focus in on just telling a good story without cheap lazy written plot devices like r2d2 and that missing map chunk, rey learning the force in 5 seconds, the almighty Captain Phasma spilling the beans effortlessly out of character to name a few...you get the point.
 
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@MacDuffle Solid post! What kind of stuff do you write?

Is it really possible to write a story in which the characters don't have an arc though? Even if a character doesn't really change, wouldn't that still be a flat arc?
 
Mr Plinkett says it better than I can lol.



But outside of keeping it simple stupid. This isn't some brilliant trail blazing film here considering it has obvious plot holes like r2d2 and that fucking map bullshit.

Sooo I'm of the opinion they should have just stuck with what works, and then focus in on just telling a good story without cheap lazy written plot devices like r2d2 and that missing map chunk, rey learning the force in 5 seconds, the almighty Captain Phasma spilling the beans effortlessly out of character to name a few...you get the point.


I haven't seen anyone say it's a trailblazing, brilliant film. But a fun, entertaining SW movie. SW isn't the kind of movie you judge the same way as Godfather or Citizen Kane.

It's been brought multiple times it's fairly likely Rey is not a newcomer to force training. Hence the name of the movie.

I dunno how anything Phasma does can be out of character considering she had a minute of screen time.

The original trilogy is filled with obvious plot holes. If you were to see it today without nostalgia blinders you'd be complaining about so many things.

You keep bringing up the same points ad nauseam, as if somehow your subjective feelings prove other peoples subjective opinions invalid. And I realize you're gonna reply with "Forum discussion board, derp derp", but doesn't it get tiresome?
 
I haven't seen anyone say it's a trailblazing, brilliant film. But a fun, entertaining SW movie. SW isn't the kind of movie you judge the same way as Godfather or Citizen Kane.

It's been brought multiple times it's fairly likely Rey is not a newcomer to force training. Hence the name of the movie.

I dunno how anything Phasma does can be out of character considering she had a minute of screen time.

The original trilogy is filled with obvious plot holes. If you were to see it today without nostalgia blinders you'd be complaining about so many things.

You keep bringing up the same points ad nauseam, as if somehow your subjective feelings prove other peoples subjective opinions invalid. And I realize you're gonna reply with "Forum discussion board, derp derp", but doesn't it get tiresome?

Nobody is looking for Godfather fella, but those people that are slightly disappointed with the direction this one took are allowed to debate such points in this thread. I find it fun to debate it. "lol forum discussion board derp derp?" Why don't you parrot that question to every Honda thread, every Conor thread, every Obama, gun's right...ISIS, gay marriage license thread or muslim thread in the war room?

Ask every Sherdoger if they get tired posting in like titled threads because they enjoying the topics within? I mean I shouldn't have to,once again, explain the entire purpose of this website right? I mean outside of Holly's high kick, every thread in every room is chalk full of the same people debating the same points day in day out. This shouldn't be a surprise to you by now. I mean your not an idiot, right? You can observe patterns in certain poster's preferred topic.

Like if I made a thread based on religion, I would wager we would have Ripster posting within the first page, his same tired thoughts. Do I ask him why he posts? Should I? Should you?

I like listening to people try to convince me that what they saw was great. Because when someone says "ooo clearly Ren was hurt from Chewies blaster" and then I post a gif of Ren doing acrobatic swings against Finn which show no sense of someone swinging while hurt...it's enjoyable.

When someone says "ooo I think it's awesome that we are getting a different kind of 'anti hero' this time around" I wanna hear the reasoning on it. Defend it. Tell me what's great about it. Because it's different? Does different = better then? I wanna know. That's the point of forums. That's the point of this thread. Unless of course you would rather we all just sing songs and praise JJ for giving us such a great popcorn flick designed to sell toys brilliantly.

Did you wanna do that? We can do that. Here;

 
Nobody is looking for Godfather fella, but those people that are slightly disappointed with the direction this one took are allowed to debate such points in this thread. I find it fun to debate it. "lol forum discussion board derp derp?" Why don't you parrot that question to every Honda thread, every Conor thread, every Obama, gun's right...ISIS, gay marriage license thread or muslim thread in the war room?

Ask every Sherdoger if they get tired posting in like titled threads because they enjoying the topics within? I mean I shouldn't have to,once again, explain the entire purpose of this website right? I mean outside of Holly's high kick, every thread in every room is chalk full of the same people debating the same points day in day out. This shouldn't be a surprise to you by now. I mean your not an idiot, right? You can observe patterns in certain poster's preferred topic.

Like if I made a thread based on religion, I would wager we would have Ripster posting within the first page, his same tired thoughts. Do I ask him why he posts? Should I? Should you?

I like listening to people try to convince me that what they saw was great. Because when someone says "ooo clearly Ren was hurt from Chewies blaster" and then I post a gif of Ren doing acrobatic swings against Finn which show no sense of someone swinging while hurt...it's enjoyable.

When someone says "ooo I think it's awesome that we are getting a different kind of 'anti hero' this time around" I wanna hear the reasoning on it. Defend it. Tell me what's great about it. Because it's different? Does different = better then? I wanna know. That's the point of forums. That's the point of this thread. Unless of course you would rather we all just sing songs and praise JJ for giving us such a great popcorn flick designed to sell toys brilliantly.

Did you wanna do that? We can do that. Here;



Debate is fine. But it's been a month now and you're not saying anything you haven't already said that hasn't had a counter argument brought up, and this has happened several times. Because there's been a month of it.

There are several answers to your questions and it's perfectly fine if you don't consider them good enough. But getting shot with a bowcaster that's been set up throughout the movie as exceptionally powerful, showing him bleeding and sweating profusely is ample enough for some people to accept a serious injury. If it isn't for you, that's fine. Just like showing him doing "powerful attacks" for many people doesn't lessen the severity of the injury any more than the fact that he's actually standing after being shot. We're talking about a universe where magical abilities give people super powers. If I can accept that he can eat a bowcaster shot, it isn't too hard for me to accept that he can spin in a circle.

To an extent I even agree with you that it needed one small extra step to really make it perfect. But, Jesus, I got over it. I didn't complain about it for a month.
 
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