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The Wook, what bothers me and tends to hurt you is that you have a habit of not responding to the valid debating points others raise, and tend to focus on the more subjective and inflammatory stuff. I had a longish post a few pages ago now where I addressed some of the specific points you'd raised in what I felt was a cool and objective manner and... nothing. When people ignore legitimate options for rational debate, it kinda lends itself to the implication that that individual isn't
interested in other viewpoints, or in potentially having their arguing points nullified. Despite you claiming otherwise, you seem to
want to keep hating this film.
I've
always welcomed healthy debate. The years have seen me utterly reverse myself on various things simply because someone presented a counter-argument cogently enough I realized they were right and my interpretation of facts was off. So don't think it's me trying to bring
you around to
my way of thinking. I merely think you are well-meaning, but in error where the facts are concerned, and presenting an opposing interpretation. Mutual exploration of both sides would see what ends up holding up, but you don't engage. Experience has taught me that's a sign that you know your argument is flawed.
In defense of Wook, if someone posted a thread about how awesome ROTJ was, I would be at least as livid posting a response to every compliment with my absolute disdain for every frame of wasted celluloid I believe that film to be. I can't say that, in the process, I might not even step out of line.
Ironically, I hold ROTJ and TFA as having a lot of the same faults -- too much story squished into one film. The former because George wanted to be done with Star Wars and not have to deal with three
more films after that one (let alone the Prequels that he had been saying in interviews up until that point that he'd be doing after Luke's story was done)... and the latter because of having to get everyone caught up on over a generation of intervening time and what's changed, plus introducing the new characters and story points. I have a lot of criticisms to level at both, but ultimately I also enjoy watching both... ROTJ just less so. It's my least favorite of the OT, but I like it better than the Prequels. Meanwhile, even with its faults, there's enough new and good stuff in TFA that I am far from tired of it, and hold it somewhere around the level where I place Star Wars and Empire. *holds up hands* That's just me. Don't get mad or try to convince me otherwise.
The Prequels did not feel ambitious to me, except technically. What aspects felt like a new story to you? Not argumentative. Genuinely curious.
I liked that they weren't action movies. They were bold fantasy movies that were definitely from a guy, not a studio.
Sure, they were boring. But so was the dark crystal and star trek: TMP. So is opera (my day job is being a technical director for opera) I've sat through a lot of long boring operas that were still masterpieces.
But on the other end, it wasn't just technical aspects that were ambitious. It was the scope. We're talking full fledged space opera. There is literally nothing like the prequels.
I'll interrupt here to adress this first main point. I didn't find any of the Prequels
boring. I also don't find Star Trek: TMP boring (much less so the Director's Cut), nor The Dark Crystal. I'll also throw in that I am utterly enraptured by 2001: A Space Odyssey. I don't need whiz-bang action to catch and hold my attention. I need good characters and interesting ideas. That's where I felt the Prequels were lacking. The story was murky and confusing, the characters were largely more charicatures, the lack of a good director who was good with people was painfully apparent... *shrug* There are a lot of great
moments in the Prequels, but overall I'd call only call them ambitious in the sense that they tried for a lot -- I feel pretty strongly that they didn't succeed, however, for more reasons that I won't go into here.
Oh, I also like listening to opera. Much the same as I like listening to Broadway musicals and plays. I'm less keen on watching any of them, mainly because of how limited in scope they tend to be, due to the technological restrictions of the space and medium. That's what "bores" me, when I get bored with them. I'd be fine just listening while doing something else -- but I can't easily do something else sitting there in the theater. And I can tell you, Aida and Carmen and The Marriage of Figaro and the Ring cycle all have clearer and better-thought-out plots and motivations than the Prequels, IMO.
Whereas TFA has some flaws. I can except that. But even the flaws are unoriginal. They're the same ones that plague so many modern action movies. The same ones that we see in Nutrek, transformers, etc.
With the prequels, even their flaws stand on their own
Plus, there was no macguffin or superweapon . It was a story about the people who lived in that galaxy
Enh... Plenty of maguffins. And TPM was at least as much a retread of the story used for the original Star Wars, as has been pointed out. You might not consider the droid control ship a superweapon,
per se, but it served that role for the film. It was big and scary and everyone was doomed if they didn't take it out. And as for it being a story about the people who lived in that galaxy... The series is called Star
Wars. Angst and learning about the characters needs to serve that larger context. A lot of the characterization in the Prequels was just exposition for the sake of exposition. Never mind all of the spoilers for the OT that should have been kept as the surprises they were originally presented as.
If it had been, as Lucas originally had sketched out, the story of Obi-Wan coming into his own as a young Jedi Knight, fighting in the Clone Wars for Bail Organa, meeting and training Anakin, and seeing everything come crashing down around him... and if Lucas had kept Larry Kasdan and Gary Kurtz on to help with the more human aspects... I think it would have been amazing. The two worst things to happen to the Prequels were George deciding to do only three instead of six, and Rick McCallum convincing him the six extant films (once the Prequels were finished) are/should be all about Anakin.
And I'll acknowledge a couple of JJ's blind spots from NuTrek were represented in TFA, but the CBS/Viacom/Paramount corporate cluelessness was quite, quite absent. And, in my book, TFA doesn't have anywhere
near the problems the Transformers movies have, top to bottom. However clunky the end result, the people making TFA gave a damn about it, versus those other two. That, obviously, from my posts, has made the difference for me.
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Solo4114 I had no idea that's why they call them "S-foils".
It's one theory, that I discount. The B-Wings in ROTJ disprove it. They also responded to Wedge's call to "lock S-foils in attack position". I personally think it's just an abbreviation of "spacefoils". i.e., the wings.
You know is also a bit too played out for me? The whole mystery parents thing. didn't they already do that on Rebels? And also with Guardians of the Galaxy? And Harry Potter? And....and....and....
Rebels? No. There's no mystery about Ezra's parents (beyond what the Empire did with them and whether they're still alive or not). They were ordinary people who objected to the rise of the Empire, spoke out about it, and were disappeared by the government, They just happened to have a kid who was strong with the Force, by accident of genetics or whatever.
Guardians? Not really. He knew who his mom was. He had her stories of who his dad was, but he's not the only kid on Earth who never knew his father and only has stories. The crew he was running with knew who his father was, and are unimpressed by him. We know his father's an alien, and he'll probably find out, too, in the next film. The audience was totally not being kept in the dark, there.
With Harry Potter, are you talking books or movies? The books cover a lot more about James and Lily than is shown in the films. They're largely a mystery to Harry, because he was too young to remember them and he's reliant on other people's stories of them. But they're not a mystery to the audience, again. They were just typical magical folks living their lives and standing up against a jerk trying to ruin it all.
There is, in audience terms, and for storytelling purposes, a big difference between
us not knowing who a character's parents are, and
them not knowing who their parents are. With Luke he knew his mother died when he was very young and his father was the navigator on a freighter. Up until he found out (when we did) that his father was actually a Jedi Knight and a fabulous pilot. Then he found out (when we did) that his father was
also Vader. Ezra was old enough to know and love and remember his parents. They were just taken from him. And as for Rey...
She has a dim recollection of family (the novelization has her mother saying they'd be back for her), but we don't know if she even remembers their names or what they looked like. She, and we, have no idea who they are or were or whether they were anybody or nobody. At the end of Star Wars and Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone and Guardians of the Galaxy and the first season of Rebels, we know a decent amount about the main characters' parents. At the end of TFA, we know nothing about Rey's or Finn's, and you have to have read the Shattered Empire comics to know anything about Poe's (and Aftermath to know about Snap Wexley's).
--Jonah
