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What about Finn?


Filthy Jawa
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At least Abrams exceeded my expectations. After the disrespectful dumpster fire of a Star Trek reboot and my general opinion that he's overrated due to being rather shallow, the day that he was announced as director is the worst disappointment I've experienced as a Star Wars fan.

 

But, even though The Force Awakens isn't great. It was an acceptable big budget movie and didn't do any particular damage to the franchise. And Abrams went in the opposite direction from his Star Trek mistake and was too faithful to the original material instead. Basically, The Force Awakens is a fairly good movie whose biggest sin is being a wasted opportunity.

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The whole too much like the original thing always gets me. I mean the movie is alot like Star Wars, that is just a fact. Whether it is too much like Star Wars is an opinion. However when you constantly hear how something "doesn't feel like Star Wars" it's hard to fault someone for being too much like the original. I mean we've had people say they are "out" based on the fact that we could have "shades of gray" characters and many other things.

 

It just feels like for some people, not saying anyone in particular, the sweet spot of not being too much like previous movies yet still feeling "like Star Wars" is pretty damn small.

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Well, I can't really speak to a person that would have a problem with that since it's not my issue. I'm a guy that champions the Prequels partially on its desire to find new environments, aliens, and characters to explore. So, for example, when the variety of spaceships in a 2015 mega budget feature somehow is thinner than what they had in 1977 and the only new ship design I can recall off the top of my head was the troop carrier, you can't blame me for being disappointed and calling them out on it. ESB and RotJ each offered plenty of of new designs and no one had an issue there. Rogue One played around with the designs and no one seems bothered.

 

And, even though RotJ gets points taken off for recycling too much, ESB did plenty well in giving us interesting new places to explore (particularly Bespin). Outside of the lightly explored crashed Star Destroyer, and arguably where Luke was hiding, the locations were either boring or Tatooine except not.

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I think that just shows how people care and love different things about Star Wars, I really could care less what the ships look like.

 

Even if it's not your thing (the occasional critiques of the various Enterprise designs we have around here go over my own head to a large degree), it is illustrative of just how conservative they were and how paralyzed they seemed to be to make it like the Original Trilogy. With the explosive imaginative possibilities of Star Wars open to them, they couldn't even raid the archives to give us a decent variety, much less design something new.

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I agree that if JJ had come to me and said "hey this is what we got, any ideas" I would have gone for a few changes. Mainly maybe have Rey in some other kind of desolate location rather than a desert and no Starkiller Base having planet destroying powers. But they don't really hurt the movie for me.

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But they don't really hurt the movie for me.

 

<shrug>

 

Seeing what cool thing will come next from this world is a good chunk of the fun inherent of Star Wars. Using the design aesthetic of the Original Trilogy as a jumping off point would have been fine. Heck, even highlighting it through the first act when Rey herself is in her own familiar world would have been smart, but the overall lack of new ideas made the universe shrink for me (seeing Starkiller Base's shots from other planets didn't help either). Star Wars, to me, is a creative beast that always needs to be fed with new ideas, new aliens and cultures, new planets.

 

Rey should not be alone in going on her adventure into a larger world. At least to some degree, we should be going with her, but we're not. There's little discovery to be found in The Force Awakens for even a casual fan.

 

 

 

You don't get it. I don't need to back it up.

 

Yeah, yeah, who needs reasons when you can just automatically categorize everything as Prequel = Bad? Life is so much easier when you realize "opinion" means you don't have to think or even make sense anymore.

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As for going on the journey with Rey, it's just different. In this case we know the universe and the wonders of Star Wars. We know the Force and hyperspace travel and planet destroying weapons, lightsabers, storm troopers etc. We know this awesome stuff and we are saying "c'mon Rey, this is awesome. Come on and get involved in this!!".

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You know it's funny, I see your point about new planets and ships and it relates to something I've thought about Star Wars that kind of bugs me. Now bear with me because this isn't a fully formed thought, but I think the internet is ready for the half-baked contents of my mind.

It has kind of bugged me that every new Star Wars movie seems to unveil dozens of new alien species (and no I haven't counted and TFA is no exception here). So they may have skimped on ships, but they didn't skimp on the non-humans. And it just kind of bugs me because how many life-sustaining planets are in this one galaxy, that there are now in the Star Wars that we know, what, maybe fifty? Seventy-five? A hundred different alien species? So not only have all these different species managed to evolve to this level at roughly the same time in the same galaxy, but in this galaxy that seems to have constant wars, they have all survived too? Nobody committed genocide on the goddamn Rodians at some point?

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And it just kind of bugs me because how many life-sustaining planets are in this one galaxy, that there are now in the Star Wars that we know, what, maybe fifty? Seventy-five? A hundred different alien species?

 

Well over that. Return of the Jedi, The Phantom Menace, and Attack of the Clones all have over 50 distinct sentient aliens. The Phantom Menace at 60.

 

 

 

Nobody committed genocide on the goddamn Rodians at some point?

 

Well, we do know of a few extinct sentient species. The Massassi being the most famous.

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But there weren't constant wars, didn't Palpatine say that there hadn't been a war in 1,000 years?

Okay I don't know. I just find every time I see twenty new aliens in a Star Wars movie, supposedly inhabiting this part of the universe, this little part of my brain says, "well now this is no longer realistic!"

I suppose you can argue that with faster-than-light travel they have access to a pretty wide part of the universe. Maybe Star Wars even takes place in more than one galaxy?

 

But it takes me out of it because I feel suddenly reminded of the toy sales and the need for the effects guys to express themselves. Same with the droids. I'd probably complain if it was all R2 units and Greedos all the time too, but I feel like there's a happy medium between that and what we've seen.

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I don't see a problem with the number of aliens. It's not like we've got a handle on the probabilities anyway. Scientists argue all the time on whether life is relatively common or rare (possibly unique) in the universe and a good chunk really is just speculation. There are hundreds of billions of stars in a galaxy after all. Entertaining science fiction likes to make it pretty common just for entertainment's sake, and considering Star Wars is far from hard science fiction, it's not going to be particularly worried about it anyway.

 

The opening scroll of Attack of the Clones mentions that "several thousand solar systems" joined the Separatist movement, and that was only a fraction of the Republic and doesn't even really account for the lightly populated planets like Tatooine and Jakku that escape notice from the large governments. Admiral Ozzel, before he was choked to death in Empire Strikes Back, noted the large number of uncharted settlements across the galaxy that the totalitarian government doesn't even know exist when searching for the Rebels. So there are a ton of inhabited planets and aliens unaccounted for. Presumably, we're familiar with most of the ones that are common across the galaxy by now though.

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I suppose you can argue that with faster-than-light travel they have access to a pretty wide part of the universe. Maybe Star Wars even takes place in more than one galaxy?

.

A long time ago in a couple galaxies far far away?

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