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selenakI originally had planned to wait a little until I watched it, but then I realised that if I did that, chances were I wouldn't be able to watch it unspoiled, so I thought, what the hell, and caught an afternoon performance. Overall result: fun movie, I love two of the new characters, some things were great, some (minor) things were groanworthy, some were headache inducing but may clear up and become great in the next movies.
Before I get into spoilery details, however, a warning: I'm not quite the target audience because of various issues that make me part of a minority among Star Wars watchers:
1) I genuinely, really, unironically love the prequels, whereas I only like the OT.
2.) I couldn't care less about whether or not Han Solo shot first. And while we're at it, Han Solo was the character I cared least about in the OT. I was interested in Vader, Leia and Luke, not necessarily in that order, but Han never got more than a shrug emotionally from me.
3.) I read a few of the EU books that got published in the otherwise Star Wars less years between, but stopped relatively early on, because with one exception, where it was something of a subplot, they didn't touch on the one thing in the post OT era I was actually interested in - Leia dealing with the Vader revelation. (I was also interested in Luke and Leia having a sibling relationship, but no book ever seemed to deal with that before I stopped reading, either.) Otherwise, I was fine with leaving Luke, Leia and Han where they were at the end of Return of the Jedi and didn't need any follow up.
All this established, here's what I thought about The Force Awakens:
J.J. Abrams is displaying all his strengths here (and thankfully leaving off the lense flares ), which include a fast pace, handling an ensemble while giving character scenes to all his leads, and a good heroine. Seriously, Rey is so a cousin of Sydney Bristow (Alias) and Olivia Dunham (Fringe), and perhaps the most Abrams-ish element in the movie. (I love her.) Speaking of JJ stuff, I felt let down by the lack of a red ball anywhere. How come, Abrams? Rambaldi was counting on you! Well, I suppose we could always postulate that BB 8 (aka the cute round droid from the trailers) was originally painted red and the white over orange was just camouflage...
On the stuff presumed readers are really interested in, which isn't my Abramsverse flashbacks. The three main characters in this movie were Rey, Han and Finn, in that order of screen time/narrative importance, with Leia having a much shorter supporting role and Luke only a cameo appearance at the end - which btw I was okay with since it's a clear set up for the next movie, and the Quest For Luke is the outward plot driving both villains and heroes in this film, which was Han's big farewell. Yes, that's right, Harrison Ford finally got his wish. (Legend has it he already badgered Lucas to kill Han off in Empire and Jedi.) I wouldn't be surprised if that was one condition of him playing the role one more time, but then again, it could also be that the scriptwriters were plotting it this way to begin with, because this movie is deliberately matching the big storybeats of A New Hope while giving them each their own twists, and as soon as Han is heading to meet our main villain in black while the young 'uns and Chewie are by plot condemmed to watch from a distance, you know that Han just drew the Obi-Wan Kenobi lot, if you didn't before.
In general, I thought Han got a good farewell; he had ample screen time, he got to be quippy (if in a wiser, older fashion than the young Han had been), brave and inventive in his escapes, he had a personal, moving story throughout the movie, he reconciled with Leia (and their temporary estrangement hadn't come because of lack of love or stupid misunderstandings but because of the shared yet dividing tragedy that is the loss of a child, emotional if not literal), he did not die randomly but in an attempt to save his son, and his death was the big tragedy of the otherwise optimistic movie. (Given that said movie also explodes a few populated planets, you can clear you r throat here, but then A New Hope is treating the destruction of Alderaan also as of lesser emotional impact, in the long term, than the death of Obi-Wan Kenobi. It's the old "abstract millions versus individual death" thing again.)
You have to bear in mind my lack of previous attachment to Han Solo, though; if I had loved him, I might be devastated by now and shaking my fists to the heavens. Or something.
(Speculation: I wouldn't be surprised if each of the planned new trilogy movies focused on one of the original trio, whether or not that means said focused on person dies in the course of the action.)
I'm a bit in two minds about whether or not Finn humanizes the stormtroopers. On the one hand, yes, of course, he's a main character, on the other, the movie is very careful to establish that Finn personally hasn't killed anyone, used to work in sanitation and that the massacre he's sent to participate in at the start of the movie is his first military mission, which shocks and disgusts him so deeply that he promptly deserts. Also, he later seems to have no problem seeing the rest of the stormtroopers as an evil whole as opposed to, say, "former comrades on the wrong side, some of whom I might able to persuade", and we see no other stormtrooper's face. (The only one other than Finn who gets a bit of characterisation is the female supervisor voiced by Gwendoline Christie, but we don't see her face, either. She however has the dialogue which contains the one single explicit nod to the prequel canon I've been able to spot; when Hux the wannabe Tarkin says to her re: Finn's desertion, whether she's sure she wouldn't prefer to have clones as soldiers , and she assures him her guys are properly conditioned anyway.) Be that as it may, Finn's a very likeable character. I've seen comparisons to Han in A New Hope in that Finn has the "originally just wants to leave, must decide to commit to cause/new friends" story, but character-wise he's quite different, given his motivation to get the hell away is based on the horror of knowing the First Order from the inside, and he's otherwise more the naive young man type; it's Rey who gets to be the hardened survivor. More about her in a moment, because speaking about stormtroopers and the First Order leads me to something I have to get off my chest first.
To wit: Lucas wasn't exactly subtle about some rl inspiration for the Empire, given that the stormtroopers are called, well, stormtroopers, but good lord, he's got nothing on Abrams, who decided that more is more and gave his First Order the full Space Nazi makeover. Their flag is red with a black insignia. At one point supporting villain Hux, in full Hitler rant imitation, shouts his speech, and the stormtroopers are actually raising their right arms to perform a Sieg Heil in response. Readers, a collective groan/snort went through the German cinema in which I watched. (The Anglo-American love for the Third Reich as the ultimate role playing game: still going strong.) Other than headdesking over the salute, it made me also long for Peter Cushing's low key and far more effective approach to Tarkin. (I mean, Hux, played by a British actor, is clearly meant to evoke Tarkin, but he's such a youthful wannabe, and the ranting space Hitler speech is no help at all.)
Speaking of wannabes: Kylo Ren is a Darth Vader wannabe and failing at it as badly, but that's intended and textual. He's also an EU plot point making it into the movies which josses the EU, to wit, he's Han and Leia's son whom Luke tried to mentor into a Jedi and who went Dark Side instead. (Causing Luke to take off to parts unknown and both Leia and the First Order to search for him ever after.) Also, his original, pre-Sith name was apparantly Ben (that's what Han calls him in their climactic scene togehter), which makes no sense to me because Leia didn't know the late Kenobi as Ben, just as Obi-Wan (and wouldn't it make more sense for her to call her son "Bail", if she called him after a dead person she's attached to), and Han only called him "old man" in an irritated fashion for the few hours of their acquaintance. A well, maybe Leia gave Luke the chance to name the kid. Anyway, Kylo Ren. Uses the dark side effectively for the first half of the movie, but so far isn't interesting in himself to me, solely in the angst he causes Leia and Han (and absent Luke). It's a bit hard to take him seriously as a villain when he uses the black mask like a fanboy just for the coolness factor, without needing it at all. To me, the emotional horror near the end of Revenge of the Sith when that mask was lowered on Anakin's face was one of the worst/best moments of the prequels because while that mask (and the entire Vader getup) is keeping him alive, it's also sealing him into a living tomb/hell. His own fault, but it's still a terrible fate carrying its own punishment, and made the moment of unmasking by Luke near the end of Return of the Jedi even more moving to me. So seeing Kylo Ren, who unmasked suspiciously looks like the MCU version of Loki (with whom he has the emo-ness when he actually has a family that loves him in common) , treat the Vader get up as something great is... well, like I said, Kylo Ren feels like a fanboy dropped in the 'verse, actually. (No offense to the actor, whose big scene with Han actually has him selling me on his inner conflict when committing patricide.)
(Sidenote: while watching, I wondered how when he was taught by Luke he could come to that conclusion, given that Luke's version of Anakin's life certainly didn't make Darth Vader sound like something to aspire to, but another review wittily concluded that Ben/Kylo Ren probably listened and thought 'So...grandpa was a badass feared by all until he went light side again, at which point he died; moral: stay Sith!', which, yeah, sounds like the character.)
(Who also has an entertaining but juvenile passive aggressive bitchy rivalry going on with Hux; their "Supreme Leader" - get it, LEADER! God, Abrams, what's next, said guy residing on planet Obersalzberg? - is voiced by Andy Serkis and otherwise a GCI creature looking more like E.T. than Palpatine, and only present via hologramm like the Emperor was in Empire Strikes Back. Anyway, said rivarly has definitely a teenage "boys competing for dad's favour" feeling to it, as opposed to the tension between Tarkin and Vader in A New Hope, which wasn't solely about their respective Empire status but also about genuine disagreements. One of the reasons kid me got interested in and curious about Vader in A New Hope was what he said about the Force versus Tarkin's belief in the Death star, and also his correct prediction Leia would not voluntarily betray the Rebellion. It conveyed to me that this was a villain with his own opinions and codex which, while not better than that of the other villains, still was somewhat different, which made him interesting to me.)
Of the young 'uns, Rey is by far the most adult feeling. We don't know yet whether or not she's related, though this is Star Wars, so she probably is Luke's long lost daughter. (The flashbacks she had when touching his light saber were clearly a mixture of his and her memories, so it's not yet possible to tell whether some of these memories are the same (i.e. with both of them present), at least not until the DVD comes out and you can freeze individual images.) The "related" alternative would be that she's Han's and Leia's daughter, but Han and Leia don't mention a child other than Ben/Kylo Ren, and given their parental angst, surely another lost child would have come up. Or she could be no Skywalker relation at all, with, say, one or both of her parents having been among Luke's students who got killed when Kylo Ren went darkside, but that doesn't match with her and Kylo Ren's respective ages (they don't look many years apart; Kylo Ren clearly is still in his 20s, and Rey in the one flashback of her as a girl when she's separated from SOMEONE is only four or five). Also, Rey's a naturally gifted pilot, very good at mechanics and a strong force user.... which all fits Anakin, so until the next movie, I'm going with the assumption she's Luke's kid whom he thought was dead for REASONS, and that her having inherited all of Anakin's talents is the ironic counterpart to Kylo Ren's wanting to be Vader and failing (precisely because he sees Vader the image and not Anakin the person).
However, the movie provides Rey with enough background to explain all of this in a non-biological way, if Abrams wants to be revolutionary and introduce us to a non-Skywalker (non-Kenobi) natural force user. Grey's talent for mechanics, for example, was honed by years of living as a scavenger selling bits and pieces from broken space vessels as a way to earn a living; like Luke, she has flying experience via those small motorbike and hovercraft things they use on Not!Tattoine (the desert planet she grew up on is called Juko) and had ample time to study a lot of vessels while she scavenged them, which could explain how quickly she figures out how to fly the Millennium Falcon; and even the fact she successfully uses the lightsaber for the first time against Kylo Ren in the big showdown near the end is a bit prepared because we see her use the pole thing she keeps carrying around through the movie earlier as a weapon (when she takes out Finn during their first meeting) in a manner similar to how she uses the saber (which isn't really like a sword, more like a longer club, plus Kylo Ren is wounded, so to all you Mary Sue criers, I say: bah! She's got survival practice, she's motivated, and the Force is with her.
Like I said before, Rey reminds me a lot of other Abrams heroines while being her own character: like Olivia, she had the tough childhood and the stoic attitude, like Sydney, she's great at improvisation and has this quiet seething anger in her scenes with Kylo Ren that gave me happy Syd and Sloane memories (not that Kylo Ren is anywhere old or mature enough to match Arvin S.) , and her basically adopting first BB-8 and then Finn has overtones of how both these ladies don't want civilians with them but protect them (and are in turn helped by them later) anyway. Also, Abrams to his credit never falls into the "Strong Women (tm) aren't allowed to be emotional" trap of action movies in his tv shows, and he doesn't do so here; Rey for all her desert stoicism is giddy with delight when her flying the Falcon for the first time actually works out, she's full of wonder when seeing a green planet for the first time (as someone only used to the desert would be!), and in tears about Finn when he's in a bad situation. Ditto for her shock, grief and outrage about Han's death. The actress really sells it, too, and the audience I was in so went with her that in the scene where Rey attempts the Jedi mind trick and after two unsuccessful attempts succeeds (which gets her out of her cell and on the run again), it exploded into applause, "Yes" calls and cheers, the biggest and loudest claps in the entire movie.
Rey is easily my favourite of the new bunch. I'm looking foward to her scenes with Luke, now that she's found him, to her adventures in general, and am of course thrilled to bits she's the new Jedi in the 'verse.
Bits and piece:
- either a continuity headache or something that will be explained in the next movie: the lightsaber. It's the blue one, Luke's first, which came from Anakin (via Obi-Wan picking it up at Mustafar) - and which ended up in the Bespin ventilation shaft. Now there is one obvious Doylist reason why this is the lightsaber Rey finds; Kylo Ren recognizes it and later tries claim it (in vain), which is because it used to be Anakin's, not Luke's. The green lightsaber which Luke built for himself after Bespin and uses in Return of the Jedi would be of no interest to the Vader-obsessed Kylo Ren, one assumes. Also, this could mean Luke still has his green lightsaber with him, which would make sense: no matter how guilty Luke feels about his nephew going Dark Side after his tutelage, it wouldn't be a good idea to leave a lightsaber lying around in a galaxy where the Sith are back. But I still want an explanation where the blue light saber came from, and who retrieved after it, and Luke's hand, fell down the ventilation shaft. Abrams better provide one in the next movie!
- thankfully, both the heroes and villains include a lot more women in their ranks, and not just in non speaking roles; in addition to Rey, Leia and Gwendoline Christie's Stormtrooper Supervisor, there's the centuries old barkeep Han knew (fate left ambiguous, but I'm assuming she survives), who gets the Yoda-like wise old alien role
- any bets on whether or not the Supreme Leader is Palpatine Resurrected? That Ian McDiarmid doesn't voice him doesn't have to mean anything. Also, I miss (Prequel era) Palpatine, who to me was such an effective villain because until his zombiefication in the duel with Mace Windu, he succeeded by playing it low key and with an affable, "reasonable" attitude, instead of laying it on with the sinister cackling like he would as Emperor. You could see why not just Anakin but the entire Jedi council and most of the galaxy, in fact, for the longest time was taken in.
- Abrams the fast paced relationship builder strikes again: Finn and Poe the Resistance pilot spend at most an hour together early on during their escape but hug it out at their unexpected reunion in the last third of the movie as if they were long lost blood brothers; the only explanation (which I'm fine with in my head) is that they had an instant crush on each other when they met.
- C3PO stumbling into the Han and Leia reunion was a wonderful example of comic relief balancing pathos and entirely fitting.
Before I get into spoilery details, however, a warning: I'm not quite the target audience because of various issues that make me part of a minority among Star Wars watchers:
1) I genuinely, really, unironically love the prequels, whereas I only like the OT.
2.) I couldn't care less about whether or not Han Solo shot first. And while we're at it, Han Solo was the character I cared least about in the OT. I was interested in Vader, Leia and Luke, not necessarily in that order, but Han never got more than a shrug emotionally from me.
3.) I read a few of the EU books that got published in the otherwise Star Wars less years between, but stopped relatively early on, because with one exception, where it was something of a subplot, they didn't touch on the one thing in the post OT era I was actually interested in - Leia dealing with the Vader revelation. (I was also interested in Luke and Leia having a sibling relationship, but no book ever seemed to deal with that before I stopped reading, either.) Otherwise, I was fine with leaving Luke, Leia and Han where they were at the end of Return of the Jedi and didn't need any follow up.
All this established, here's what I thought about The Force Awakens:
J.J. Abrams is displaying all his strengths here (and thankfully leaving off the lense flares ), which include a fast pace, handling an ensemble while giving character scenes to all his leads, and a good heroine. Seriously, Rey is so a cousin of Sydney Bristow (Alias) and Olivia Dunham (Fringe), and perhaps the most Abrams-ish element in the movie. (I love her.) Speaking of JJ stuff, I felt let down by the lack of a red ball anywhere. How come, Abrams? Rambaldi was counting on you! Well, I suppose we could always postulate that BB 8 (aka the cute round droid from the trailers) was originally painted red and the white over orange was just camouflage...
On the stuff presumed readers are really interested in, which isn't my Abramsverse flashbacks. The three main characters in this movie were Rey, Han and Finn, in that order of screen time/narrative importance, with Leia having a much shorter supporting role and Luke only a cameo appearance at the end - which btw I was okay with since it's a clear set up for the next movie, and the Quest For Luke is the outward plot driving both villains and heroes in this film, which was Han's big farewell. Yes, that's right, Harrison Ford finally got his wish. (Legend has it he already badgered Lucas to kill Han off in Empire and Jedi.) I wouldn't be surprised if that was one condition of him playing the role one more time, but then again, it could also be that the scriptwriters were plotting it this way to begin with, because this movie is deliberately matching the big storybeats of A New Hope while giving them each their own twists, and as soon as Han is heading to meet our main villain in black while the young 'uns and Chewie are by plot condemmed to watch from a distance, you know that Han just drew the Obi-Wan Kenobi lot, if you didn't before.
In general, I thought Han got a good farewell; he had ample screen time, he got to be quippy (if in a wiser, older fashion than the young Han had been), brave and inventive in his escapes, he had a personal, moving story throughout the movie, he reconciled with Leia (and their temporary estrangement hadn't come because of lack of love or stupid misunderstandings but because of the shared yet dividing tragedy that is the loss of a child, emotional if not literal), he did not die randomly but in an attempt to save his son, and his death was the big tragedy of the otherwise optimistic movie. (Given that said movie also explodes a few populated planets, you can clear you r throat here, but then A New Hope is treating the destruction of Alderaan also as of lesser emotional impact, in the long term, than the death of Obi-Wan Kenobi. It's the old "abstract millions versus individual death" thing again.)
You have to bear in mind my lack of previous attachment to Han Solo, though; if I had loved him, I might be devastated by now and shaking my fists to the heavens. Or something.
(Speculation: I wouldn't be surprised if each of the planned new trilogy movies focused on one of the original trio, whether or not that means said focused on person dies in the course of the action.)
I'm a bit in two minds about whether or not Finn humanizes the stormtroopers. On the one hand, yes, of course, he's a main character, on the other, the movie is very careful to establish that Finn personally hasn't killed anyone, used to work in sanitation and that the massacre he's sent to participate in at the start of the movie is his first military mission, which shocks and disgusts him so deeply that he promptly deserts. Also, he later seems to have no problem seeing the rest of the stormtroopers as an evil whole as opposed to, say, "former comrades on the wrong side, some of whom I might able to persuade", and we see no other stormtrooper's face. (The only one other than Finn who gets a bit of characterisation is the female supervisor voiced by Gwendoline Christie, but we don't see her face, either. She however has the dialogue which contains the one single explicit nod to the prequel canon I've been able to spot; when Hux the wannabe Tarkin says to her re: Finn's desertion, whether she's sure she wouldn't prefer to have clones as soldiers , and she assures him her guys are properly conditioned anyway.) Be that as it may, Finn's a very likeable character. I've seen comparisons to Han in A New Hope in that Finn has the "originally just wants to leave, must decide to commit to cause/new friends" story, but character-wise he's quite different, given his motivation to get the hell away is based on the horror of knowing the First Order from the inside, and he's otherwise more the naive young man type; it's Rey who gets to be the hardened survivor. More about her in a moment, because speaking about stormtroopers and the First Order leads me to something I have to get off my chest first.
To wit: Lucas wasn't exactly subtle about some rl inspiration for the Empire, given that the stormtroopers are called, well, stormtroopers, but good lord, he's got nothing on Abrams, who decided that more is more and gave his First Order the full Space Nazi makeover. Their flag is red with a black insignia. At one point supporting villain Hux, in full Hitler rant imitation, shouts his speech, and the stormtroopers are actually raising their right arms to perform a Sieg Heil in response. Readers, a collective groan/snort went through the German cinema in which I watched. (The Anglo-American love for the Third Reich as the ultimate role playing game: still going strong.) Other than headdesking over the salute, it made me also long for Peter Cushing's low key and far more effective approach to Tarkin. (I mean, Hux, played by a British actor, is clearly meant to evoke Tarkin, but he's such a youthful wannabe, and the ranting space Hitler speech is no help at all.)
Speaking of wannabes: Kylo Ren is a Darth Vader wannabe and failing at it as badly, but that's intended and textual. He's also an EU plot point making it into the movies which josses the EU, to wit, he's Han and Leia's son whom Luke tried to mentor into a Jedi and who went Dark Side instead. (Causing Luke to take off to parts unknown and both Leia and the First Order to search for him ever after.) Also, his original, pre-Sith name was apparantly Ben (that's what Han calls him in their climactic scene togehter), which makes no sense to me because Leia didn't know the late Kenobi as Ben, just as Obi-Wan (and wouldn't it make more sense for her to call her son "Bail", if she called him after a dead person she's attached to), and Han only called him "old man" in an irritated fashion for the few hours of their acquaintance. A well, maybe Leia gave Luke the chance to name the kid. Anyway, Kylo Ren. Uses the dark side effectively for the first half of the movie, but so far isn't interesting in himself to me, solely in the angst he causes Leia and Han (and absent Luke). It's a bit hard to take him seriously as a villain when he uses the black mask like a fanboy just for the coolness factor, without needing it at all. To me, the emotional horror near the end of Revenge of the Sith when that mask was lowered on Anakin's face was one of the worst/best moments of the prequels because while that mask (and the entire Vader getup) is keeping him alive, it's also sealing him into a living tomb/hell. His own fault, but it's still a terrible fate carrying its own punishment, and made the moment of unmasking by Luke near the end of Return of the Jedi even more moving to me. So seeing Kylo Ren, who unmasked suspiciously looks like the MCU version of Loki (with whom he has the emo-ness when he actually has a family that loves him in common) , treat the Vader get up as something great is... well, like I said, Kylo Ren feels like a fanboy dropped in the 'verse, actually. (No offense to the actor, whose big scene with Han actually has him selling me on his inner conflict when committing patricide.)
(Sidenote: while watching, I wondered how when he was taught by Luke he could come to that conclusion, given that Luke's version of Anakin's life certainly didn't make Darth Vader sound like something to aspire to, but another review wittily concluded that Ben/Kylo Ren probably listened and thought 'So...grandpa was a badass feared by all until he went light side again, at which point he died; moral: stay Sith!', which, yeah, sounds like the character.)
(Who also has an entertaining but juvenile passive aggressive bitchy rivalry going on with Hux; their "Supreme Leader" - get it, LEADER! God, Abrams, what's next, said guy residing on planet Obersalzberg? - is voiced by Andy Serkis and otherwise a GCI creature looking more like E.T. than Palpatine, and only present via hologramm like the Emperor was in Empire Strikes Back. Anyway, said rivarly has definitely a teenage "boys competing for dad's favour" feeling to it, as opposed to the tension between Tarkin and Vader in A New Hope, which wasn't solely about their respective Empire status but also about genuine disagreements. One of the reasons kid me got interested in and curious about Vader in A New Hope was what he said about the Force versus Tarkin's belief in the Death star, and also his correct prediction Leia would not voluntarily betray the Rebellion. It conveyed to me that this was a villain with his own opinions and codex which, while not better than that of the other villains, still was somewhat different, which made him interesting to me.)
Of the young 'uns, Rey is by far the most adult feeling. We don't know yet whether or not she's related, though this is Star Wars, so she probably is Luke's long lost daughter. (The flashbacks she had when touching his light saber were clearly a mixture of his and her memories, so it's not yet possible to tell whether some of these memories are the same (i.e. with both of them present), at least not until the DVD comes out and you can freeze individual images.) The "related" alternative would be that she's Han's and Leia's daughter, but Han and Leia don't mention a child other than Ben/Kylo Ren, and given their parental angst, surely another lost child would have come up. Or she could be no Skywalker relation at all, with, say, one or both of her parents having been among Luke's students who got killed when Kylo Ren went darkside, but that doesn't match with her and Kylo Ren's respective ages (they don't look many years apart; Kylo Ren clearly is still in his 20s, and Rey in the one flashback of her as a girl when she's separated from SOMEONE is only four or five). Also, Rey's a naturally gifted pilot, very good at mechanics and a strong force user.... which all fits Anakin, so until the next movie, I'm going with the assumption she's Luke's kid whom he thought was dead for REASONS, and that her having inherited all of Anakin's talents is the ironic counterpart to Kylo Ren's wanting to be Vader and failing (precisely because he sees Vader the image and not Anakin the person).
However, the movie provides Rey with enough background to explain all of this in a non-biological way, if Abrams wants to be revolutionary and introduce us to a non-Skywalker (non-Kenobi) natural force user. Grey's talent for mechanics, for example, was honed by years of living as a scavenger selling bits and pieces from broken space vessels as a way to earn a living; like Luke, she has flying experience via those small motorbike and hovercraft things they use on Not!Tattoine (the desert planet she grew up on is called Juko) and had ample time to study a lot of vessels while she scavenged them, which could explain how quickly she figures out how to fly the Millennium Falcon; and even the fact she successfully uses the lightsaber for the first time against Kylo Ren in the big showdown near the end is a bit prepared because we see her use the pole thing she keeps carrying around through the movie earlier as a weapon (when she takes out Finn during their first meeting) in a manner similar to how she uses the saber (which isn't really like a sword, more like a longer club, plus Kylo Ren is wounded, so to all you Mary Sue criers, I say: bah! She's got survival practice, she's motivated, and the Force is with her.
Like I said before, Rey reminds me a lot of other Abrams heroines while being her own character: like Olivia, she had the tough childhood and the stoic attitude, like Sydney, she's great at improvisation and has this quiet seething anger in her scenes with Kylo Ren that gave me happy Syd and Sloane memories (not that Kylo Ren is anywhere old or mature enough to match Arvin S.) , and her basically adopting first BB-8 and then Finn has overtones of how both these ladies don't want civilians with them but protect them (and are in turn helped by them later) anyway. Also, Abrams to his credit never falls into the "Strong Women (tm) aren't allowed to be emotional" trap of action movies in his tv shows, and he doesn't do so here; Rey for all her desert stoicism is giddy with delight when her flying the Falcon for the first time actually works out, she's full of wonder when seeing a green planet for the first time (as someone only used to the desert would be!), and in tears about Finn when he's in a bad situation. Ditto for her shock, grief and outrage about Han's death. The actress really sells it, too, and the audience I was in so went with her that in the scene where Rey attempts the Jedi mind trick and after two unsuccessful attempts succeeds (which gets her out of her cell and on the run again), it exploded into applause, "Yes" calls and cheers, the biggest and loudest claps in the entire movie.
Rey is easily my favourite of the new bunch. I'm looking foward to her scenes with Luke, now that she's found him, to her adventures in general, and am of course thrilled to bits she's the new Jedi in the 'verse.
Bits and piece:
- either a continuity headache or something that will be explained in the next movie: the lightsaber. It's the blue one, Luke's first, which came from Anakin (via Obi-Wan picking it up at Mustafar) - and which ended up in the Bespin ventilation shaft. Now there is one obvious Doylist reason why this is the lightsaber Rey finds; Kylo Ren recognizes it and later tries claim it (in vain), which is because it used to be Anakin's, not Luke's. The green lightsaber which Luke built for himself after Bespin and uses in Return of the Jedi would be of no interest to the Vader-obsessed Kylo Ren, one assumes. Also, this could mean Luke still has his green lightsaber with him, which would make sense: no matter how guilty Luke feels about his nephew going Dark Side after his tutelage, it wouldn't be a good idea to leave a lightsaber lying around in a galaxy where the Sith are back. But I still want an explanation where the blue light saber came from, and who retrieved after it, and Luke's hand, fell down the ventilation shaft. Abrams better provide one in the next movie!
- thankfully, both the heroes and villains include a lot more women in their ranks, and not just in non speaking roles; in addition to Rey, Leia and Gwendoline Christie's Stormtrooper Supervisor, there's the centuries old barkeep Han knew (fate left ambiguous, but I'm assuming she survives), who gets the Yoda-like wise old alien role
- any bets on whether or not the Supreme Leader is Palpatine Resurrected? That Ian McDiarmid doesn't voice him doesn't have to mean anything. Also, I miss (Prequel era) Palpatine, who to me was such an effective villain because until his zombiefication in the duel with Mace Windu, he succeeded by playing it low key and with an affable, "reasonable" attitude, instead of laying it on with the sinister cackling like he would as Emperor. You could see why not just Anakin but the entire Jedi council and most of the galaxy, in fact, for the longest time was taken in.
- Abrams the fast paced relationship builder strikes again: Finn and Poe the Resistance pilot spend at most an hour together early on during their escape but hug it out at their unexpected reunion in the last third of the movie as if they were long lost blood brothers; the only explanation (which I'm fine with in my head) is that they had an instant crush on each other when they met.
- C3PO stumbling into the Han and Leia reunion was a wonderful example of comic relief balancing pathos and entirely fitting.
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Date: 2015-12-18 12:47 pm (UTC)Until proven otherwise, my personal headcanon might be that he was partly lying to Poe (which WOULD be in character) and is a sanitation engineer who stole a soldier's identity then belatedly realized what being a soldier in this army meant. The problem with that being that he has no compunction about blowing up the base where presumably other sanitation engineers are already working?
Re: Poe my headcanon is that he's just REALLY affable & makes instant best friends with everyone (and also has a crush on Finn).
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Date: 2015-12-18 02:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-12-18 02:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-12-18 02:51 pm (UTC)Incidentally, that's another thing I like about the prequels. Not that Lucas always succeeds, but he definitely tries to tell a far more complicated story than in the OT. Because it's not just Anakin who falls, the Republic does, on every level, and not because some evil outsider takes over. Palpatine is the ultimate political insider, collecting more and more political "emergency" powers while using a series of wars he himself instigated to justify this. And the Jedi Council is partially to blame both because they've become too much a government instrument, because by and large, they're far too rigid and elitist and lastly because in the end, they're nearly resorting to the same methods. One of my favourite things about Revenge of the Sith is Anakin still wavering until Mace Windu point blank tells him to assassinate Palpatine. (Like Palpatine had earlier told him to kill Dooku, something Anakin did but still recognized as wrong and not Jedi worthy.) Not that it lessens Anakin's own responsibility for what he does later (all of it), but because it really shows that the Council at that point HAS lost its own standards. My interpretation for the whole "The Chosen one will bring balance ot the Force" prophecy through the prequels was that it didn't just refer to Anakin/Vader eventually killing the Emperor, or that Luke, not Anakin, was the Chosen one. It referred to the fact that the Force at the start of the prequels is already out of balance not solely because Palpatine is around but just as much by how many of the Jedi are acting, and that Anakin, both by helping to destroy the order and as it existed in the end the Sith, restored balance, because Luke isn't a traditional Jedi, and couldn't be, and any new Jedi will learn from Luke.
...and of rambling detour. Anyway: prequels = were willing to let good guys be guilty of actual wrong things.
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Date: 2015-12-18 03:00 pm (UTC)And I do like the broad strokes of the prequel trilogy although I'm overall not crazy about the execution.
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Date: 2015-12-18 09:58 pm (UTC)One thing I really enjoyed about the film was that Rey, Finn and Poe all had little bits of both Luke and Han and Leia in them and still managed to have their own personalities.
I loved Han back when I had my big Star Wars-period in my early twenties (don't know how I would feel about the character if I came across him for the first time now). And while you're probably right that the main reason for his death was that Harrison Ford didn't want to do more than one movie, his death felt sad and horrible and utterly right for me.
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Date: 2015-12-19 08:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-12-20 02:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-12-20 06:13 am (UTC)Courtship of Princess Leia: yes, I've read it, and second your impression. :)
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Date: 2015-12-21 10:05 pm (UTC)/which makes no sense to me because Leia didn't know the late Kenobi as Ben, just as Obi-Wan (and wouldn't it make more sense for her to call her son "Bail", if she called him after a dead person she's attached to/ - This. So much.
/'So...grandpa was a badass feared by all until he went light side again, at which point he died; moral: stay Sith!'/ - LOL!
/bah! She's got survival practice, she's motivated, and the Force is with her./ - *nods*
/You could see why not just Anakin but the entire Jedi council and most of the galaxy, in fact, for the longest time was taken in./ - Oh, yes, he was a great villain that way. *nods*
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Date: 2015-12-22 06:13 am (UTC)Prequel era Palpatine: most subtle, effective and successful villain of the entire Star Wars saga in any incarnation so far. (I mean, OT era Darth Vader was always the most interesting to me, but subtle, he was not....)
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Date: 2015-12-22 06:40 am (UTC)Also, I just read this entertaining fic dealing with the baby-naming issue. ;)
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Date: 2015-12-22 04:57 pm (UTC)The planet-blowing-up wasn't treated as that big a deal in general, I thought. It's fair enough for Ren's parents to hope he can be redeemed even after that but would the rest of the resistance accept him back? Perhaps they were going to imprison him or something but I think the stakes of whether he could be redeemed would have been higher if he hadn't killed millions of people yet.
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Date: 2015-12-22 05:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-12-23 06:34 pm (UTC)