Vague and sweeping spoilers below.
The Force Awakens is fully on a level with the original three films, as far as I remember them. These are four good scifi action movies. The new one is actually better in being much more inclusive of women and non-Europid people. It's quite a loving re-visit to the original material.
My main complaints with the new one are that
- The tempo is too uniform and too high
- No time seems to pass between scenes, with the main characters never even having a change of clothes
- People need no training to operate star ships and military weaponry
- The story is a clear and intentional repeat of A New Hope
- It reintroduces the exact threat that the three original movies dealt with, obviating the entire struggle there. Cf. Sauron showing up and making trouble long after Morgoth got tossed into the Timeless Void.
- Log in to post comments
More like this
When I was a little kid, I frequently snuck into my older brother's room and read his collection of science fiction books and pulp magazines (see previous post on SF&F books). My mother, who was (and is) a big fan of The Princess and the Goblin by George MacDonald (a lovely book and…
A while back P. Z. Myers wrote a snotty, obnoxious post about how much he hated the big Les Miz movie. Now, I happen to be a bit protective of Les Miserables. I regard the original novel as the finest ever written, and I think the stage version of the musical does a good job of capturing the…
I have been a huge Quentin Tarantino fan ever since seeing Reservoir Dogs in college. I have loved all of his movies, with Jackie Brown being the only item in the corpus that gets a rating below brilliant. So you can imagine my excitement over the premiere of Inglourious Basterds. I almost never…
The Martian is a feel-good, science positive, uplifting film about the power of the human spirit, botany, and engineering. It looked, from the credits, like it had at least 8 scientific advisors from NASA (and possibly other places). Too bad that Ridley Scott only half listened to them. As one of…
So, more of this, then.
http://www.starwarsringtheory.com/
Now, Lucas has spoken often about the use of repetition in Star Wars. He typically puts it in a musical context: “[Star Wars] is purposely written like a piece of music, with themes that repeat themselves in different ways, and ideas that reprise from one generation to the next.” 12 However, in The Beginning, a documentary on the making of Episode 1, he instead likens the repetitions to poetry: “Instead of destroying the Death Star [like Luke], [Anakin] destroys the ship that controls the robots. It’s like poetry. Every stanza kind of rhymes with the last one.”
Here it's more like another Luke destroying another Death Star.
Two of the main characters are trained soldiers & the other is a pilot with extensive mechanical experience whose lack of training with a blaster is a minor plot point...so I'm not sure I follow your third point?
Neither the soldier nor the metal recycling professional can be expected to know how to use a light sabre or pilot a star ship.
"non-Europid people"
Definitely needed a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.
Of course, they shouldn't look like people at all, but that is not practical. I do remember an episode of Star Trek (TOS, of course) where, on another planet, the clock face was just like on Earth. That is something which could easily have been done differently. On the other hand, they produced a show a week, and most were better than later big-budget sci-fi movies taking months to produce, so I can forgive them (along with the styrofoam rocks which are the same on all planets).
"non-Europid people"
Definitely needed a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.
Of course, they shouldn't look like people at all, but that is not practical. I do remember an episode of Star Trek (TOS, of course) where, on another planet, the clock face was just like on Earth. That is something which could easily have been done differently. On the other hand, they produced a show a week, and most were better than later big-budget sci-fi movies taking months to produce, so I can forgive them (along with the styrofoam rocks which are the same on all planets).