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Star Wars Pulls In $1 Billion At Record Speed (reuters.com)
New submitter henrydan798 writes to note that Star Wars: The Force Awakens has set a new record for ticket sales, becoming the fastest movie ever to earn a billion dollars at the till. As the L.A. Times reports, The latest installment in the "Star Wars" franchise grossed an estimated $153.5 million in the U.S. and Canada in its second weekend, beating the lower end of analyst expectations of $140 million. This drives the J.J. Abrams-directed picture to a to-date domestic gross of $544.5 million.
"The Force Awakens," which cost an estimated $200 million to produce, debuted last weekend to record domestic ticket sales of $248 million. It also grossed $281 million overseas for a global total of $529 million, topping the previous worldwide debut benchmark set in June by "Jurassic World" ($525 million). This week, with an international estimated gross of $546 million to date, the film became the fastest to surpass $1 billion globally.
Were any of those dollars yours? If so, do you think they were well spent?
Congratulations on the successful marketing! And still, I'm in no rush to see this movie. I'll wait until I can rent a BluRay in my local video store, to watch it at home, where already for significant time the image and audio quality is more pleasant than in most public theaters, not to mention the comfort of having control over volume, play/pause etc., and the absent mob of other people.
The new film was (a) far better than the train wreck of the prior three, (b) essentially identical to the first (1977) Star Wars plot, (c) decently acted, and (d) a mediocre movie, but one that felt better than it really was in comparison to the horrors of the prequels. It worked on a nostalgic level: it felt like the Star Wars universe again, and it didn't totally fuck it up. It didn't so well work on the level of being original or even fully making sense within its own universe.
Mixed bag. Not as horrible as the naysayers claim, but not as awesomely great as the fanboys claim.
But does the viewer?
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
No doubt the film was popular. How to get all those people in and out a a record pace? Squeeze the theaters by requiring them to show the film on the largest screens for a long period of time, pushing out any other movies. The Hateful Eight was to be shown in a special 70mm roadshow presentation. The problem though was that it could only be shown on smaller secondary screens. Disney required their new movie to show on the largest ones, or else not show the movie at all, on any screen.
So while their film is popular, it's not just the marketing hype that got it the numbers. A bit of strong arm tactics to push aside other movies seems to have contributed.
Mild spoiler warning.
Of course it made a billion dollars, it's a decent Star Wars movie. They could have made a great Star Wars movie if they didn't just remake A New Hope. Of course that would also risk a bomb that would kill ticket sales for the further installments.
Better to shoot for mediocrity and guarantee billions than to shoot for greatness and risk the cash cow. Hopefully the next non-Abrams director will be willing to make a new movie.
I stole this Sig
Thank God someone else who isn't brainwashed thinks this movie isn't God. My coworkers went as far as to call anyone who disagrees it isn't the best ever as idiots
http://saveie6.com/
Don't want to sound....whatever.....put any qualifier that comes to mind here....but I am done with cinema going in general and Star Wars in particular!!
I see now that the whole idea of what movie and movie going is, has changed. It is a much larger "consumer experience" that involves merchandizing, social media, a plethora of buttons being pushed cleverly on kids and their parents, social engineering, social media, stiffing political correctness.......and the quality of the actual film is not significant anymore! It is a product, not a movie!
The actual movie [only a part of the product]....ouch! Let's not bother repeating the obvious - just go to IMDB and read the top 50 "non-professional" reviews. 47 are negative and the points why TFA sucks tremendously are explained eloquently and in detail. The official reviews are an insult to our intelligence....my the gods even the guy who [hilariously] destroyed Ep 1-3 (red letter media) is buying the crap...I cannot continue...only curses come to mind :(
But man, the product worked like a charm! I watched it on 25th at 11:00 AM in the one of the only two places in NL where you get the 3D IMAX stuff. I had the best seat in the whole theater and was prepared to love the film. I did Ep.4-6 marathon the previous day, brushed my figures (R2D2, Imperial walkers) and posters - we are talking about a boy who saw the originals at age of 7 - a life time devoted fan!
Every family took a picture of their kids next to the model of BB-8! Merchandizing was everywhere....Every family kept on taking pictures inside the theater and sharing them in the last few minutes before the show. The cinema cleverly had a gallery of images form the trailers flashing on the screen starting from 10 minutes before 11. Guess what - everyone took a snapshot the moment they appeared like they'd been force mind tricked - I am sure that was the intention of showing the images. I honestly felt alien, like being surrounded by a herd of strange animals and you are not sure what they'd do next...
The show started at 11:00. Sorry , wrong, wrong , wrong....there were ....wait for it....25 minutes of ads of which only 3 for movies the rest was beer, the cinema chain, Coca Cola.....I got crazy!!! You pay premium for this and they give you half an hour of ads!!! Also - politically correct BS as beer ad that says to drink responsibly and that women do not like drunken men (fuck you, you are a beer manufacturer!).
And then the show starts and I realize that I cannot bare the loudness of the sound. Surely I am partially to blame - for some inexplicable reason my hearing has grown more acute in the last year or so (go figure!) but still I am sure it was already at the the very edge of what is tolerable...I though why are not the parents worried about the kid's ears?!? So I watched the show with my in-ear headphones plugged in and the sound was just loud enough (no kidding).
Shame on JJ, shame on the official reviewers for buying this (hey, Empire magazine, do you remember your wall of shame, giving Attack of the clones 5/5 (WTF!!) - you are about to repeat that if you are not honest), shame on the whole industry for turning movie going into this....I don't know what this is..., shame on all of us for still supporting this, shame , shame, shame...
I am so sorry that one of my most precious dreams is being destroyed....the kid from the former communist state walking with his father in the streets of Sofia in 1980 (that's the delay you got back then) and we see a poster with stormtrooper firing the rifle and the title Star Wars. My father goes "this seems like a movie in space, you like this kind of things, what with reading Jules Verne and such...shall we try" [no ads back then, no reviews - you go "blind" to a movie unless someone has seen it and tells you]. ....we watched it sitting on the stairs between the rows - there were no chairs left. We went out and I said "again"...and we went on the other side of the cinema to join the line for the next performance...RIP!
Not to mention standing in line, dodging the trails of popcorn on the floor before the movie had even begun, the lengthy commercials, those blasted 3D glasses.
All perfectly good reasons for taking my kids with me and gratefully spend my money on this whole circus. Plotholes and other nitpickings about the movie taken aside, I wouldn't hesitate to go again.
Jurassic World had been released in China when it opened. TFA isn't released in China until early Jan. So breaking this record is only the beginning.
What's always bugging me is that those numbers have no real relation to other movies (except for "We made X dollars!"). What'd really enable movies to compete with each other is numbers of tickets sold. Prices can change. Let's say an indie movie charges 5 dollar per ticket and a highly anticipated movie charges 10. Attaching dollars made in total to this obscures the real numbers of popularity. This gets worse when comparing the box office over time (say, gone with the wind vs star wars).
I dont know what I saw? It may have familiar props and actors in it. But it wasnt star wars.
Please define "Star Wars" in your mind. And be specific about the elements missing from Ep7.
The fact even Finn could defeat a dark Lord of the sith shows how much of a joke it is.
Spoiler Warning....
Did we watch the same movie? I never saw Finn defeat a Sith Lord. I saw Finn LOSE to a partially-trained Jedi apprentice who fell to the Dark Side. And said apprentice defeated Finn even after getting shot with Chewie's bowcaster and running hundreds of meters outside to confront the heroes in the forest.
People wonder why we get so little new movies. This is the reason. Because they make money.
Their marketing departments understand something that e.g. banks also understand: getting new customers is hard. They also now understand how they can use social marketing to up the hype.
I expect to see more repackeged material with Newer/Faster/Better on it. Oh well, as long as the massses are happy, who cares. At least Disney now has a bit more money to invest copyright laws.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Forgot to expand that part....so the message to the new generation is that if you are born proper (jedi) no training or effort is needed to master anything. The girl in the movie did not require any mentoring and in a few hours learned how to beat a Sith and knew better the Millennium Falcon than Han Solo! This drivel is a very poor and damaging attempt of PC girl-power shit. Listen, idiots, the female lead of all time and space is Ellen Ripley! We have done it many years ago, why is everyone hailing TFA for it?! Breaking such major Star Wars universe rule [you need to learn to use the Force and light-sabres] for the sake of PC points (but also financially rewarding, get it;) is...cynical to the extreme.
And I thought Lucas went senile with the whole "Han shot first" stuff...telling the kids that they should let hired assassin kill them for the sake of not appearing...what...bad?!? Who in their right mind would blame someone in this situation for taking a chance at Greedo?!
JJ outdid all this easily...I have the nagging feeling that a large group of marketeers was set to work and they scrambled "action points" - stuff that needs to be in to please this group or the other. At the end all the points were ushered in the script and the plot was twisted to accommodate them regardless of what it did to consistency with the SW universe rules...give it to bean counters to make...well...anything and watch the world burn!
Star Wars is not a movie anymore. It is a heavily marketed brand. It can't even qualify for the label "science fiction", compared to the truly good SF movies around. Heck, Interstellar is a lot better than that, even with the hole(s) in the plot and the "Amurrica yeah!" spirit. I mean - I'm an adult. You'd literally have to drag me to a Star Wars movie, kicking and screaming.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
And said apprentice defeated Finn even after getting shot with Chewie's bowcaster and running hundreds of meters outside to confront the heroes in the forest.
I realize that exercise isn't a priority for most geeks, but I think we can both understand that at least a normal human being, much less a highly skilled jedi knight is able to run around the block and not pass out from exertion.
Most movies are either good enough, or available. This one is neither.
You can rest assured that they will get it out on video as quickly as possible so that they can begin selling it. I'm looking forward to seeing it at home on my mediocre home theater, which at least finally got DTS. (Those cheap bastards.)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Yea this bothered me. If Finn had shown ANY skill during the fight with the storm trooper earlier then perhaps I would have believed he could last more than a few seconds before Kylo cut off an arm or cut him in half.
JJ Abrahms has this problem since star trek. You have a young person with years less experience and training and they consistently outperform everyone else. It destroys my sense of disbelief.
All they had to do was show Rey using force jumps in the ruins and mine control on the food vendor-- and it MIGHT have been remotely credible. But she makes more progress in half a movie (and years less time in the story) than Luke AND Anakin did with training by masters, field experience, and a lot of time.
It's not incredible... it's simply not credible.
Kylo Ren had been trained by a master jedi for years and then went on to serve on the dark side for so long that his master was partially forgotten and partially legendary (at least a decade per the portrayal in the movie itself).
---
But I agree the first half of the movie *felt* good. It was meticulously tuned to push the right buttons and say the right things.
The second half.. well predictable would be too kind a word. You know what they would say and what they would do before the characters even said it themselves. It was simply lame.
But good star wars feel in the first half.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Could you elaborate on what didn't suck about the cinema you went to?
I realize that exercise isn't a priority for most geeks
And having served as a Marine Corps Officer, I think I'm more familiar with physical exertion than most geeks. You emphasized the distance ran, I would emphasize getting shot, and from a noticeably high-powered weapon at that. If you shot me in the side with a Dragunov rifle (which fires the same 7.62x54mm rounds as the PKM light machine gun) and told me to run the Marine Corps obstacle course ( less than 100m), and THEN fight another Marine....I'd almost certainly lose, regardless of the melee skills of my opponent.
But Ren didn't lose, he won. The entire argument of "Ep7 sucks because the Dark Jedi lost a saber fight with a Stormtrooper" is moot...because it's factually incorrect.
I watched Star Wars 1, 2 and 3 when they came out. When they released 4, 5 and 6 and called them "1, 2 and 3", I decided these couldn't be worthwhile. No way I'm going to see this new film, created by Disney.
no, I don't have a sig
You'd also have to adjust for ticket prices vs. general inflation and general size of the economy and better economies around the world due to more economic freedom and more open free speech.
So given ROW Rest of World sales are about equal or greater than US and growing, you could almost double that. And probably double it again as there is much more than general inflation between a dime or quarter or whatever they charged and $8.50 (which I paid for 3D, not the usual $13+).
Then there's concession sales, which Disney may get a cut of, or at least that's where the theater's money comes from, shifting that burden off the tickets since ye olden days.
Basically it would be difficult to properly estimate.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Your money is gone
Speak for yourself.
I am. I didn't have any expectations and I had a great time. You guys are all the same you know, when something new comes out you ignore it because it's unfamiliar and when you get what you ask for you complain because it is.
You just can't sit back and enjoy it for what it is.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
BO performance is average in India because of Indian movie "Dilwale".
Ok I looked it up. Matinee was 75 cents and evening $1. A dollar in 1940 is over $16 today.
So prices drop and quality and features (of the literal film anyway) increase. Shame on me for doubting Julian Simon.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Just sit back and enjoy the show.
Don't overanalyze.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
it will still "lose" money for tax purposes.
Not trying to sound like Jay Sherman, but if we keep going to bad movies, they will keep making them... I read all the reviews first, and went confident I was going to see an entertaining movie. I do not go to see a movie called 'Star Wars' hoping to it to be a philosophical experience, but man, it sucked big time... My main complaints: 1.) It is almost identical to the first movie. Desert planet? Check. Young, force-sensitive user that's unware of it? Check. Stranded, cute robot with a secret message to deliver? Check. Escape from said planet trying to deliver message? Check. Han Solo and Chewbacca conning the wrong guys? Check. 2.) The bad guys suck. In the first movie, Darth Vader intimidates. He is strong, powerful, and no one messes with him. Kylo Ren? A weak crybaby that is hit SEVERAL TIMES by a stormtrooper that never held a lightsaber before!!! And he is prone to tantrums. Even worse, when he removes his helmet, he looks like an idiot. I have the perfect Sith name for him: Darth Dumbo. You're welcome, Disney! 3.) The Emperor is replaced by Gollum. Enough said. 4.) Can someone explain to me why the zero-calories version of the Empire bother building a planet-sized weapon, and have thousands of armed soldiers, if they are going to leave the most vulnerable part of their humongous weapon completely unattended? Not a single guard? Han Solo & Co. just waltz in, plant bombs and there it goes! These guys are the galactic equivalent of the Dodo. I was 8 when I watched the first movie. I should have know better than to go to this kind of movie at my current age.
I think arse is the same as ass in the UK. Kind of like mum is mom.
But only because I don't have a 3D setup at home. Over 6 months I will just torrent the DVD.
I'm perfectly happy with the old version of Linux, with the sex robots. You can always uninstall them if you need the disc space.
Aberrations have appeared in my destiny prognostication engine!
I wonder if it actually made a profit , though. :S
But she makes more progress in half a movie (and years less time in the story) than Luke AND Anakin did with training by masters, field experience, and a lot of time.
It's not incredible... it's simply not credible.
Hmm... aren't you making an assumption that there is no alternative explanation for this that fits in the story? Yes, given "she makes an incredible amount of progress in a short amount of time", then one conclusion *could* be "therefore, the story is broken", but why assume that's the only possible explanation?
I wondered if her rapid pace at discovering the force wasn't discovering at all, but remembering. i.e. I won't be surprised if in Ep8/9 we find out that she had been a Padawan in training at Luke's school and when things went crazy there, they took some of the promising kids and hid them away on various planets, wiping their memories as a way to protect them. Her vision after finding the lightsaber would seem to suggest this is at least possible.
Anyway, yeah, /maybe/ that part of the story is screwed up. Or maybe, since this act one of a new multi-act story, you're supposed to wonder about some things that eventually get explained. :)
I agree the best episodes were 4-6. 1-3 were pretty bad. Bad story telling, bad acting (Ewan McGregor did ok). I didn't think episode 7 was bad. I enjoyed it. Where I differ from many people is I take the position that it is not my story. I just listen to it. If I didn't take that road, then I would've left during Wolverine when they claimed hydrochlorothiazide slows your heart rate. If they make episode 8 a film about Jesus, then fine, but I'm not buying it. I take no loss when it comes to my memories of the first films Lucas released. Actually, I'm pretty thrilled this gets my sons into Star Wars and I can watch them enjoy it and see it for the first time vicariously.
I realize it may make your cereal taste better this morning, but get over yourselves. So you haters may have paid $100 for a night at the movies with the family and were disappointed. Guess what, you spent some time with the family. If you showed up with a sour-puss mentality "this better be fucking awesome and rock my world" then you deserved to get your feelings hurt. It isn't the first time you saw a bad flick at an exorbitant price.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
When all is said and done, they'll only have a few hundred million $ loss.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Haha, so true. If it had been any more different from the original trilogy then people would be complaining that it departed from the heart and soul of SW, that it was Star Trek rebranded, etc. I took my kids to it, we had a great time too - it was fun and it felt nice and Star Wars-y.
If I was to sit back and pick the movie apart then, sure, I could find problems with it. But what's the point of doing that? I exchanged some amount of money for some amount of entertainment, and in the end I felt it was a good trade. Me looking for flaws in the movie will just decrease the enjoyment I got out of it and will in no way improve the subsequent movies, so why bother?
We like the Star Wars universe, we got to see more of it, and now I'm cautiously optimistic about future installments. WIN!
You described two things going on in movies: international appeal and merchandising.
Lucas perfected Disney's merchandising back in the late 70's. Lucas is a great marketer and deal maker.
Movies have to be made with international appeal. Action! Action! Action! That doesn't have to be translated or put into cultural context. That's why shit like the Transformer movies make a shit load of money. The Star Trek reboots were crap compared to ST:TOS because of this. ST:TOS has the cultural context of the US during the 1960s. Much of what went on goes over the head of the younger generation. Shit, I didn't get the significance of Kirk kissing Uhura and I grew up in the late 70's! Whereas; the vapid action of ST:Reboots has very little cultural context.
In other words, if you want know why movies suck now - besides having to use them to market toys and other shit - is because they need to get Chinese people to watch it - movies need to have a World wide non-cultural specific appeal to make it big these days.
Me? I'm waiting for the DVD to come out and if it's less than $20, I might get it.
Having said that, this one leverages on the fan base, its speculation about possible connections between the characters. Back in the 1970s no one asked "Who is Luke Skywalker?" or speculated he could be related by blood to super villains. Despite being hinted at as Darth Vader = Dark Father in German.
This time the net is abuzz with speculation about Rey. Everyone has all but concluded that Rey is the daughter of Luke. Some people hoping for a twist think she could be a grand daughter of Obi Wan. Or Obi Wan might have had a daughter who married luke, thus Rey could be Rey Wan-Skywalker.
I hope they pull a totally unexpected twist and make Rey an aunt of Luke and Leia. Anakin's father is left dangling in the canon, with some vague hints by Shmi that Anakin had no father. Anakin's father could be from a long living tribe (Yoda was 900 years old), well endowed with the Force who go into suspended animation who wake up time to time to create off-spring to bring balance to the Force. "To eradicate the Evil, and to establish Righteousness, I will return to the Earth from time and again" said Krishna Geetha 4:8
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
It was an extended trailer for the next movies. They barely managed to introduce all the characters.
It's the beginning of a long lived Disney(tm) franchise.
While Lucas went batshit insane with episodes 1-3, and shouldn't be allowed to write a script ever again, all of his movies at least had memorable scenes. It appears JJ Abrams can't do that, I don't remember any specific scene after seeing episode 7. None. And that goes for the other film by him that i tried to see, the Star Trek reboot a couple years ago.
Saw this one in cinemas, not sure I'll bother with the next 12 to 20 episodes.
I apologize for the lack of a signature.
Way off-topic, but: In English, ass means either donkey or (colloquially, and less common now), stupid person. Arse means backside (Saxon derivation, as I recall). some time under 100 years ago, Americans started substituting ass for arse and now use ass to mean all three things. I'm not sure exactly when this happened - the two English definitions of ass are in the 1901 edition of Websters.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I thought piracy was supposed to be killing the creative industries?
Are movie theaters in most cities really that terrible, or has it just been a long time since you've been to a movie theater? So many people gripe about having to put up with a theater experience and I just don't get it.
Within 20 miles of my home there are 4-5 "megaplex" theaters where, for a $5 matinee ticket, you can go see the very latest movies on incredibly good screens with terrific audio systems, you stand in no waiting lines, you sit in large, plush semi-reclining chairs with stadium (sloped) seating. The room is clean, the floors are clean. Heck, even the bathrooms are clean. Even if you pay a few bucks more to go at night, you still don't really wait in line and there's never any jostling for seats because you can buy your tickets online and choose your exact seat ahead of time.
At home we have a pretty nice setup for watching movies, but we still occasionally go to the theater not to "put up" with a movie theater, but because of it - it's a fun experience.
FWIW I'm not trying to rip on you, I'm just genuinely curious. :)
Imagine how much useful work could of been done for a Billion dollars
Like teaching English grammar to Slashdotters...
Did it occur to you that if you could recite the lines before they happened, maybe the force awakened in you while you were watching the film?
Hey everyone, my money is on this padiwan taking the gold in olympic fencing!
"Liberalism is a very noble idea, currently controlled by some very bad people. Be sure you do not get the two confused.
Luke had daddy issues, which was the plot of episodes IV-VI. The big disappointment here is that Ford did difficult daddy better in Cowboys and Aliens than in this film. Basically a throw away.
Perhaps somebody could explain what the hell the title means? Because it definitely doesn't make sense according to all the old EU stuff that they just threw under the bus.
(The two major parts of the Force were the Unifying Force and the Living Force. Apparently the latter idea was about the Force having a will, judging between light and dark, guiding people, etc. ...so if it can "awaken" supposedly The Force has been asleep or in a coma or something for this whole time? So what have all the Force users been drawing from? Guess thousands of years of Jedi had just misread an ancient document or something.)
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
The next one should be directed by Whedon and be call Scruffy the Vampire Slayer, with vampires of course. People would still go see it.
Don't know about you but when I'm dragged to the theater I always bring earplugs. You hear the movie fine and cut out the noise of everyone around you. I hated sitting through the ads but didn't pay attention (because they're ads) so I didn't know what they were about. Someone I was with said it spoiled who was a good guy and who was a bad guy in the movie.
Anyway I'm usually just talking with people during all that crap and just pay attention when the movie is on. Normally I check those sites that tell you when e movie actually starts and the preroll ends but we were with someone who really had to see the trailers and garbage. (Personally I find trailers are just condensed spoiler reels so I never watch.) Yeah going to the movies blows. I would have rather waited for the home video but by then I imagine the whole thing would be spoiled, not that I heard anything about the movie until I got there. It was fun. A New Hope but for a new generation.
Twinstiq, game news
Probably Yoda's daughter she is.
where I took my son and we paid $20+tax for two tickets and another for popcorn and drinks, I said fuck it no more of this BS. Got a large screen tv and a media players and never looked back. Just hit the pawn shops a few weeks after a movie comes out and then get it for $4 actually now don't even care I just free load when I can with torrents. I gto 800+ dvd's to got plenty of re-watch material.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Yes, you are the rare enlightened soul who is blessed with insite beyond all others!
How can you say it wasnt Star Wars? It was basically A New Hope with the scenes mixed a bit. Now that certainly doesnt make it a great Star Wars movie but to say it wasnt one at all is just stupid when almost every scene was from prior movies.
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
The fact that someone gave a lightsaber to a stomrtrooper and he knew how to.....swordfight is kind of ridiculous. If someone gave me a lightsaber and told me to use it, I swear I would chop my arm off. Or maybe my leg.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The second half.. well predictable would be too kind a word.
I'll bet you didn't predict they would build a death star. Too lame of a plot for that to happen.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I think that it was worth it to see the Force Awakens in movie theaters. J.J only pulled off one universe defying trick (which is way better than what he did with Into Darkness), by allowing Han to hyperspace past planetary defenses and come out of hyperspace well into the planets gravity well. It's been well established in Star Wars that hyperspacing doesn't work once you're close enough to a strong gravitational pull. And if you could all weapons would become hyperspace rockets. The movie is fun, though one thing that myself and all of my siblings agree on was that the character that we all liked the most was Poe. He was kind of over powered in the middle battle, but we still like him. The big disappointment is how powerful they made Kylo Ren at the beginning; stopping a blaster bolt he didn't even see coming with the force, while concentrating on something else; and then near the end couldn't seem to not get hit. The next beef with the movie was with how fast Rey took to using the force as good or better than Anakin, Luke or Obi-wan after they had years of practice. One thing which was introduced that I really liked, was how Kylo was feeling a pull from the light side of the force. That certainly never came up as a possibility in the movies, and I never saw it in the Extended Universe. I hope they explore that more.
Is it a movie to be seen on theaters? Absolutely.
Now, is it a good movie? So... no. Not by a long stretch, i might add. Looks great, Harrison Ford is fantastic and it is loaded with iconic scenes... but man, the script is a poor rehash of EP IV, and ridden with glaring plot holes as well.
Perhaps somebody could explain what the hell the title means?
The two Dark Side characters talk about feeling an awakening in the force, and it disturbs them because it's implying that while they've been having a few good years the light side is about to make a resurgence.
The fact even Finn could defeat a dark Lord of the sith shows how much of a joke it is.
What? Finn lost to Kylo Ren (had his spine sliced up), who isn't Sith, he's a knight of Ren.
I don't have a problem with what you're saying IF that's the explanation.
I have a problem with the things that the movie decided to withhold. Like Rey's history. At the end, Leia hugs Rey and Rey is the one to go find Luke. Why? All signs point to her being a Skywalker (and there's still a lot of debate over which one is her parent...there's even some debate that she's the granddaughter of Obi-Wan). But the Skywalker theory makes the most sense, and re-hashes the "child on a desert planet" theme that the Skywalkers have going.
But you don't know with 100% certainty that the explanation you gave is true, and neither do I. Which wouldn't be so bad, except there's really no good reason why they should have left that detail out. It's not going to be a point of ambiguity once it's revealed, and chances are, once it is revealed, the plot will carry on without making a fuss over it.
For what it's worth, it wouldn't have occurred to me that Rey was training with Ben (that's the presumption I'd make, since both would be training with the only guy they COULD be training with) because everyone around her seems to kind of not give a shit about her. Leia and Han talk about bringing Ben home, but nobody has a thing to say about Rey. Kylo Ren is more consumed with killing his father than locating a potentially powerful ally (and didn't seem like he was expecting another person strong with The Force to arrive out of thin air). The child was presumed to be old enough to walk and talk, but not a moment's thought was given to this "missing" padawan. So, the sense I get from the writing is either everyone is suffering from amnesia (LAME!) or she was strangely hidden away and maybe taught a few things but couldn't really remember any of it until the plot required that she needed to.
I've been told for pointing that out, that apparently I need a movie to spell things out for me. Those fanboys can bite me. If the writers can't be bothered to fill in enough details to make it unambiguous, that's not my problem.
Some people don't believe in fairies. I don't believe in The Patriarchy.
Fuck J. J. Abrams and everything he stands for!
JJ can do good look at stuff like fringe it was an great TV show. The first of the new startrek was actually okay (the second had awful world breaking plot holes though).
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
This movie sucked, was worse than the prequels and it is shameful that it got made in the first place.
I am surprised critical opinion did not pan it outright. Boy was I fooled.
Star Wars as a franchise though may have some merit. The fans have more imagination than the makers.
Please go on being a true believer if it makes you happy.
Seriously this. I still do not understand why people thought it was ridiculous that Finn almost beat Kylo, after the movie amply demonstrates
1) Chewies Bowcaster hits like a truck. Repeatedly shows Stormtroopers being throw off their feet from a single shot
2) Kylo hammers on his wound prior to the fight and the movie shows a pool of blood on the snow, showing how badly Kylo is bleeding out
The fact that Kylo nearly beats both Finn and Rey is a testament to his hatred/dedication.
It was just fun...
The problem that I had with it is that it really wasn't fun (maybe for kids, but not for me as an adult). I wanted to wait for it to come to blu-ray, and the only reason I went t see it in a theater was because I knew I wouldn't be able to avoid spoilers for that long and because I wanted to give it the benefit of its best presentation with an enthusiastic audience. But I at least expected a fun experience.
I knew that early reviews are worthless these days. The big studios are masters of buying reviews now, and so brainwashing everyone with hype that even honest reviewers get caught up in it. So I certainly didn't expect it to live up to the reviews, and adjusted my expectations accordingly.
But what I didn't expect it to be was so...boring. The plot was just a retread of the original trilogy (seriously, yet another Death Star, REALLY?). The characters were either paper-thin or annoying. The whole thing left me wondering about all the scenes that must have been left on the cutting room floor so they could focus on the big action set pieces and moving the plot along. It really does feel like a 4+ hour movie that's been cut down to 2 hours, with a plot that moves WAY too fast.
This constant need to keep the plot moving at a break-neck pace left a bunch of characters that are hard to really care about, relate to, or even understand. Finn's character transformations are so ridiculously abrupt that he comes off as mentally ill. Poe and Rey are so paper-thin that they could have been CGI-generated and I wouldn't have even noticed. And Kylo Ren is such a whiny emo that it was hard to even take him seriously, much less find him at all intimidating.
And all the fan service was really more sad than anything. Does no one else find it painful to watch a 73-year-old Han Solo who doesn't seem to even realize that 32 years have passed? Why does no one else in the movie notice that this cocky young pirate is now almost an octogenarian (and still playing the character as the exact same cocky young pirate)? His time on screen was at once painful to watch and unintentionally funny. And the requisite cameos from everyone else just felt forced and compulsory. I would have rather have only seen C3PO and R2D2, and left the original cast in the original trilogy where they belonged.
All-in-all, it wasn't a TERRIBLE movie (like The Phantom Menace). It was just boring and hollow. I wasn't going into it expecting a thoughtful movie (this is Star Wars after all, and produced by Disney no less). But I did expect to have fun, and to care about at least one of the characters. But at the end I walked out of the theater feeling like I hadn't really watched anything. It was like eating cotton candy without even the sugar taste.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
It wasn't bad, but it wasn't good either. C+ is the best I think its worth. It sort of reminded me of a tv episode... I was underwhelmed really. I wouldn't go see it again.
On the good side the casting and acting were exceptional, except for Kylo Ren(Adam Driver), but you already knew that. The space-chases, gun fights, light-sabre fights, etc were good.
The bad side? The Story. But that is what we've come to expect from Abrams. The not-so-subtle "were too lazy to come up with our own ideas so lets re-use plot points from the first film(Ep IV)". I think you know what I'm talking about. That was really sad, and yes, lazy. These guys were given the keys to the kingdom, and what is the best they could come up with?
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
disclose due to spoilers.
There were a few things that didn't make sense such as the lightsaber in Bespin and how that can't be explained... I might be giving too much away already.
There were a few emotional scenes and I almost cried even when I went with other people to see it I was still a little embarrassed.
I think anyone should see it, provided they watched all the previous installments, or at least A New Hope, Return of the Jedi and Empire Strikes Back.
http://gamehacking.org/vb/threads/12747-nensondubois-codes http://twitter.com/nensondubois_
The interesting thing is that of my co-workers, I've encountered Millennials who both loved it and hated it.
I was actually quite surprised that someone in their twenties would come to the same conclusions about the film that I did, that it is overtly derivative, and with no back story about the new characters. This has given me a new hope.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
He is or was a professionally trained Jedi and gifted with the force where he can dual blindfolded. Finn has no training at all with that weapon
http://saveie6.com/
The fact even Finn could defeat a dark Lord of the sith shows how much of a joke it is.
Bingo.
But rest assured, in the next film were going to get all the backstory on both Fin and Rey, about how they sort of "sprouted, wholly formed as Jedi badasses" out of nothing. I can hear the Abrams apologists now enthusing about "JJs brilliance" that by giving us nothing about Fin and Rey(or Kylo Ren) in the first film, and then to fully flesh them out with history, etc in the second film... When in reality that sort of fleshing out and back story should have happened in TFA, not the next film.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
Um, said stormtrooper lost every lightsaber battle he entered into.
Shiny New Australia.
You mean, when Luke, whose previous dogfighting experience was shooting womp rats, evaded turbolasers down a long trench pursued by a mature Sith lord and destroyed the death star by nailing a tiny target without his targeting computer on?
Versus when Rey nearly lost to a badly wounded teenage sith apprentice?
Shiny New Australia.
but he didn't chop his own arm off, which is quite an accomplishment when wielding a giant, sizzling laser
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I've noticed that light sabers do seem to have some sorts of safety features. For example, when a person goes flying through the air out of control, their light saber usually retracts. I don't know whether the canon is that this happens on its own or whether the wielder calls the retraction, but it seems to be a general thing. Also, when a person loses their grip on a light saber (such as when it gets knocked from their hand), it also retracts automatically.
Nobody seems to be really concerned about novices injuring themselves with light sabers... heck, in Ep 4, Obiwan didn't even react when Luke started handling his father's lightsaber with it pointed at his head, or when he turned it on and started swinging it around in a crowded space right next to him without any sort of training.
Shiny New Australia.
I've been told for pointing that out, that apparently I need a movie to spell things out for me. Those fanboys can bite me. If the writers can't be bothered to fill in enough details to make it unambiguous, that's not my problem.
And there you have it. One of the key problems with the film, there is no backstory or any inclination as to why Fin or Rey have been thrust into the Jedi roles they take in the film.
Of course we will be informed, in the second film, what their stories were, but to leave that sort of important details out in this first film is a real problem.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
Nobody seems to be really concerned about novices injuring themselves with light sabers... heck, in Ep 4, Obiwan didn't even react when Luke started handling his father's lightsaber with it pointed at his head, or when he turned it on and started swinging it around in a crowded space right next to him without any sort of training.
Yeah, I basically count that in the category of "unrealistic"
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Sometimes in the movies, lightsabers seem really strong, they can cut through steal. Other times, they bounce off flesh with hardly any damage done. They are certainly not consistent weapons.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The difference is that in New Hope Lucas directly addresses those points in the movie.
The movie says that ...
Luke is already an experienced and qualified flyer with years of experience flying in a narrow canyons at high speed firing at 2 meter targets with a mounted weapon.
Biggs tells the rebellion, "Luke is the best brush pilot in the galaxy".
Luke says it's no different than shooting Womp Rats in the canyons back home.
Extending to a filmed but deleted scene..
Biggs also says to Luke (in a deleted but filmed scene in a bar on Tatooine) "You may be the hottest bush pilot this side of Mos Eisley, Luke, but those little skyhoppers can be dangerous. They move awfully fast for tropospheric craft "faster than they need to. Keep playing engine jockey with one and someday, whammo! You're going to be nothing more than a dark spot on the damp side of a canyon wall."
Extending to the Star Wars Wikia..
The T-16 Skyhopper
"Even so, these airspeeders were often used as training vehicles by the Rebel Alliance, due to the fact that their flight controls were similar to those of X-wings. "
Womp Rat
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki... [wikia.com]
These are two meters long and moving.
Thermal Exhaust Port
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki... [wikia.com]
"The target area is only two meters wide. It's a small thermal exhaust port, right below the main port. The shaft leads directly to the reactor system."
- Jan Dodonna on the attack on the first Death Star
So Luke spent his misguided youth flying at high speeds down canyons shooting at moving 2 meter targets with a mounted youth in a craft with the same control system as X-Wings.
And the mission was to fly down a dangerous canyon at high speed and fire at a 2 meter target with a mounted weapon! Sounds tailor made! lol.
To be fair, he didn't really dog fight either. He flew in and did a bombing run.
--
If Rey and done anything or they said anything in the movie to justify her massive immediate mastery of the force, it would have helped a lot. As I said above, a trivial example would have been a scene of her force leaping in the ruins of the StarDestroyer. Another trivial example would have been a scene of her mind controlling the food vendor for a little extra food.
But instead there was nothing. It was as bad as Chris Pine in Star Trek. A completely unqualified, untrained person drops into the role and out performs people with years more experience and training. I know from experience in the SCA that someone with even a few months training and experience is going to cut a novice to pieces in seconds. You have no muscle memory. You have no reflexes. And you have no clue.
And neither did Rey.
Fin... was less clear. He was trained and experienced and probably had several kinds of martial arts training which might have included Kendo.
But to show him getting owned by another storm trooper and then holding his own against Kylo Ren was dubious. He should have show skill and won the battle against the storm trooper and then he would have had more credibility. But at least he wasn't un credible. Just a bit of a stretch.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
> It is amazing what a big marketing budget can do to brainwash consumers
The marketing was so pervasive that some people _need_ to believe that it was an amazing movie. They have to rationalize their beliefs and predictions for themselves.
They'll eventually come around to the truth, though.
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
Spoilers Obviously.
I realize that exercise isn't a priority for most geeks
And having served as a Marine Corps Officer, I think I'm more familiar with physical exertion than most geeks. You emphasized the distance ran, I would emphasize getting shot, and from a noticeably high-powered weapon at that. If you shot me in the side with a Dragunov rifle (which fires the same 7.62x54mm rounds as the PKM light machine gun) and told me to run the Marine Corps obstacle course ( less than 100m), and THEN fight another Marine....I'd almost certainly lose, regardless of the melee skills of my opponent.
But Ren didn't lose, he won. The entire argument of "Ep7 sucks because the Dark Jedi lost a saber fight with a Stormtrooper" is moot...because it's factually incorrect.
The problem is we didn't really see Ren hurting from the gunshot wound. We saw him get shot, and we occasionally saw him wince and bleed, but that doesn't really register with the audience. If I could see him obviously hobbled or otherwise hurting as he fought it might be relevant, but what I actually saw on the screen was Ren defeating Fin by a narrow margin, and losing to... the girl with a slightly less memorable name. Ren as the bad guy is frankly not scary.
I think that kind of issue was indicative of the movie, there's decent ideas but they didn't think them through so they didn't really work. Imagine if Ren was a rage-filled fanatic with a ridiculous amount of power instead of a little kid with a temper tantrum. Now I'm actually scared of him.
More to the point think about how meaningless it was when they Death Star fired and blew up a Republic that basically had no role in the movie. Imagine instead if they spent the first half of the movie trying to sneak through First Order space in order to reach the Republic, and they knew they just had to reach the Republic fleets to be safe and decipher the map. Imagine we had regular scenes on Republic planets, perhaps with Han Solo, trying to smuggle them through First Order controlled territory. And then a giant Death Star comes out and simply destroys the Republic, Han Solo, and all of their plans?
I think I'd actually care about the new Death Star firing in that case.
I stole this Sig
If you can point me to a scientific in-universe explanation of the Force, I'll recant.
Altering events and the actions of others by personal force is unproven, but far from impossible.
I like the explanation that the force is an ability to predict the likelihood of near future events, possible because of an altruistic parasitic life form.
It is in line with the present tilt of research that seems to indicate we are a macro-organism made possible by many contributing and formerly uncredited life forms.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
I guess it's not inconceivable that lightsabers might have different power settings. So at the lowest setting it might be like the stun setting on Star Trek's phasors. Certainly something you might want to have when swinging one around blindly with blast helmet on (like Luke was doing on the Millennium Falcon against the training ball which likewise shot at him with what appeared to be a very low power blaster).
Still, one of the things that bothered me a bit was how Finn was able to use one with at least some apparent skill when we've been lead to believe that a lightsaber was a Jedi's weapon and one isn't going to be able to use it effectively without training. I kind of expected him to clumsily try to use it, before giving up and grabbing a blaster from a fallen stormtrooper (a weapon he would be familiar with).
The problem is we didn't really see Ren hurting from the gunshot wound. We saw him get shot, and we occasionally saw him wince and bleed, but that doesn't really register with the audience. If I could see him obviously hobbled or otherwise hurting as he fought it might be relevant,
I'm not sure why that wouldn't "register with the audience", it registered fine with me. He was pretty obviously trying to muscle through the pain of his injury, and succeeding.
but what I actually saw on the screen was Ren defeating Fin by a narrow margin,
He aggressively dominated the tempo against Finn from the first blow, culminating in burning a hole in his shoulder. Finn recovered enough to score a glancing blow on Ren's shoulder, after which Ren promptly disarms him in 2 moves. I don't consider that a narrow margin but I suppose we could argue the point indefinitely.
and losing to... the girl with a slightly less memorable name. Ren as the bad guy is frankly not scary.
I think that kind of issue was indicative of the movie, there's decent ideas but they didn't think them through so they didn't really work. Imagine if Ren was a rage-filled fanatic with a ridiculous amount of power instead of a little kid with a temper tantrum. Now I'm actually scared of him.
I think he works as a realistic villain partly because he's *NOT* an all-powerful badass. He's young, inexperienced, and highly unpredictable. He's not disciplined enough to control his powers well. It reminds me of a Vice video I saw about hitmen in Peru: most of the sicarios are teenagers. Kids on a power trip are not to be taken lightly.
More to the point think about how meaningless it was when they Death Star fired and blew up a Republic that basically had no role in the movie.
Agreed on this point. It's a persistent problem with JJ Abrams and his sense of world-building and scale (or lack thereof). And now I'm wondering how a movie with a 2-hour runtime can somehow not find time for a few scenes to help get the audience emotionally invested in the consequences of Starkiller Base.
Still, one of the things that bothered me a bit was how Finn was able to use one with at least some apparent skill
Yes lol. I've taken fencing lessons, and I can tell you, picking up a sword and trying to use it is a good way to kill yourself.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
You mean, when Luke, whose previous dogfighting experience was shooting womp rats, evaded turbolasers down a long trench pursued by a mature Sith lord and destroyed the death star by nailing a tiny target without his targeting computer on?
Yup. He destroyed a stationary target of two metres because he was used to hitting moving targets of two metres.
Versus when Rey nearly lost to a badly wounded teenage sith apprentice?
What? Badly wounded? All his limbs still worked, all his force-voodoo still worked and he was, from all appearances, at full strength.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
I like the concept that light sabers are nothing more than a plasma sheath over a solid (or, since this is Star Wars, "force field") core, magnetically constrained by a solenoidal field around the core, and with the ability to impart bursts of plasma and/or surges of high-amperage electrical current when there's a short between the plasma and the core (aka it strikes another object - except another corresponding magnetic trap, such as another lightsaber)**. In such a case then it's perfectly reasonable that there would be different power settings or that small details of the target might influence its performance.
** - The only problem with this hypothesis is that there would be a really bright flareout whenever a lightsaber was cutting something substantial, which you don't see. But really that's unavoidable in the real-world - you don't, say, burn through thick steel blast doors without a huge amount of light being given off, that's why people welding and cutting steel need goggles to protect their eyes. Also, we don't know what "blaster" shots are, so it's hard to say why or if they'd be deflected in such a hypothetical lightsabre design - they certainly seem to be subluminal, so they're not just laser beams. But in general the "magnetically constrained plasma cutter" design makes sense. It even makes expanding/retracting the lightsabre easy, as a nested collection of solenoids works out to be a linear motor - it'd automatically telescope when you turned it on, and retract when you reversed the field on alternating elements. And the color would require nothing more than a slow leak of gases from the core that tend to glow with certain colors when ionized, such as for coolant or simply to increase the visibility of the plasma. Really, the main hindrance to making such a thing in the real-world that comes to mind is the vast amounts of power and energy required in such a small device.
Shiny New Australia.
So the womp rats were armed with turbolasers and were shooting him, and some of them were sith lords trying to gun him down in the Empire's most advanced fighter craft? Sorry, but we're specifically told that his success was due to him using the Force. He pulls the exact same thing that Rey does - closing his eyes, reaching some sort of inner peace, opening them and then doing some seemingly miraculous Force-guided action. The whole point of both of these movies is about an untrained but Force-gifted individual learning to make use of their latent abilities for the first time.
And seriously, "massive immediate mastery"? Luke is the only one who had "immediate mastery". Rey reached it incrementally - first being totally dominated mentally by Kylo Ren in the forest, then being somewhat dominated mentally but ultimately learning to shut him out during the interrogation, then failing to give commands to the storm trooper, then succeeding, and ultimately, after losing to Kylo Ren (who only kept her alive because his mission was to bring her to his master), learning how to make use of it during a sabre battle. She was given repeated incremental rounds of practice. And it was anything but "mastery", she was fighting a wounded teenager apprentice who was in so much pain that he had to stop periodically, breathing heavily and hitting is side to control the pain.
And Fin held his own against Kylo Ren? Perhaps you weren't watching the same movie as me. Or perhaps to you "held his own" means "taking more than 15 seconds to be slaughtered by a badly wounded opponent".
Kylo Ren is no master. Far from it, it's a point made many times. He himself talks about it. Snoke talks about it. He makes many screwups, including being so emotionally invested in overcoming his resistance to killing his father that he lets himself get shot in the process. He's no Vader, despite how much he desperately wants to be.
Shiny New Australia.
No, I mean "speak for yourself" as in "my money is not gone, so don't tell me that it is".
I see, so you responded to try to poison my experience.
I am old enough to be able to tell commercial hype and paid reviews from actual quality and honest recommendation.
And cynical enough to be incapable of suspending judgement too, it would seem. That you even read them shows a pretty toxic attitude and not very good for your mental health.
My money is unspent (on this). I only downloaded it because of ESR's comments about the filming location of the last scene, where new Luke finds old Luke.
Oh, so you reduced it to your bandwidth costs instead, you still spent your money, but instead wasted your potential to experience joy with others by watching a downloaded fragment of the movie to confirm it wasn't up to you 'standards', or was it the whole movie you watched. You sound very sad, lonely and pathetic to me. It's a real shame for you.
And what can I say: If that unimaginative "best of" remake keeps you entertained,
Just say nothing, anything you do say just spoils it for others and no one is interested in you opinion anyway.
What entertains me doesn't get made into movies, like Eon, Redemption space, The City and the Stars, They're sci-fi *books*. What entertained me about Star Wars was going to have a good time with my friends, bringing the kids and grandpa, getting there a little late to get some ice cream which helped us avoid the ads, piling into the seats we *booked* and sitting there with my best friend who I saw the original movies with. You think it's about a movie, I think it's about people. That's why...
I pity you.
Actually, you pity yourself. I wouldn't be surprised if no one wanted to see the movie with you because you ruin the experience for everyone around you with your moaning and groaning and you instead justify that by saying 'you didn't want to see it anyway'.
People like you are why new stories for movies don't get made because you suck the oxygen out of the room and there is no fun when you are around. I have zero expectations from movies anymore because of whiners like you and your constant, draining pointless negativity that poisons everything.
Which is, of course, an excuse for you to maintain your misery, which you can wallow in alone. If you want to remain pathetic, that's your choice.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Haha, so true. If it had been any more different from the original trilogy then people would be complaining that it departed from the heart and soul of SW, that it was Star Trek rebranded, etc. I took my kids to it, we had a great time too - it was fun and it felt nice and Star Wars-y.
Thank goodness some people have a clue. I pretty much did the same thing.
We like the Star Wars universe, we got to see more of it, and now I'm cautiously optimistic about future installments. WIN!
Yeah, I think that Abrams had to hook into the old movies to make the connection. I also noticed that there was a lot of hooks from the Star Wars books, which had some pretty good stories if you aren't expecting hard sci fi and were just reading for entertainment. I share your cautious optimism and I think that this director knows that there are some pretty caustic people out there who attempt to ruin it for everyone.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Whatever Rei. I think you are being unreasonable. It'll be pointless to continue this further. May the force be with you.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Something about Rey's look made me think of Qui-Gon Jinn
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
That sounds like something that could actually be constructed.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Has this gotten my money? Not yet. I plan to watch the Darths and Droids version of this movie first.
Now, I'd like to discuss two things that were mentioned in Reddit. I'm not asking for spoilers, I just want to open up some wild mass guessing.
First, what is the likelyhood that episode 8 will reveal that the guy whose name translates to a type of fish will turn out to be Sith-lord Binks, having stayed in the background since Palpatine double-crossed him way back in episode 3 by promoting Doku instead of him.
Second, how likely is it that Luke -- and yes, I saw while skimming through that he is missing (or otherwise out of the way) at the start of the movie will turn out to have turned dark at the end of 6 (after all, Yoda made a prophecy about him, etc. -- all the pieces are there, he could just have been acting "good" with the goal of Father+Son ruling the galaxy ... but darn it, daddy died. Hmm, maybe Luke + Binks as episode 8 lords?)
Yea, I know, but I said: Wild mass guessing.
(I think Binks as Sithlord would make a great plotline; I don't know if that's what will happen. Luke having turned bad at the end of 6, and hiding it from those near him at first, only to get away to found his own Evil Inc.? Until I found out that he starts this movie off in hiding, I didn't think that was possible. Err, did I just say "No, that's impossble"?)
Yep, it actually could - although somewhat underpowered versus what you see in the movies due to the limitations of the power source with modern technology, cooling issues, field strength limitations, etc. But the basic technology is already there - just a magnetically constrained plasma cutter with the core (telescoping solenoids) as the electrical return on your circuit. There's no reason it wouldn't work, it's not much different from how we already cut things today. The plasma on plasma cutters doesn't extend to "sabre length", but that's because it diffuses - constrain it in a solenoidal field and it should have no trouble doing so. You'd probably even get the standard random crackling sparks when two "sabres" hit each other (not from shorting between the cores - they're not closing a circuit - but from plasma-leaking to the cores during magnetic reconnection of kinks from the interaction of the two nonaligned fields.)
Shiny New Australia.
Even if you made a light saber that had to plug into a 440 volt outlet, that would still be really cool (I would not be the one to wield it though lol)
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I pay little attention to media, and looked at as little as I could because I wanted to avoid spoilers. All I knew was that it was a Star Wars movie set after the original trilogy. I liked it. There were several things I didn't like, but I'm hoping some of them get resolved in the next movie.
I don't trust the review of anyone who doesn't realize that Finn lost to an already hurt Kylo Ren. He handled the light saber like it was an unfamiliar weapon. He didn't hurt himself with it, but I assure you that a novice can use a hand-to-hand weapon without hurting himself or herself.
The people I knew who saw Phantom Menace were not complimentary about it, with one exception. There was no pod race in this movie, nor a kid with a flair for piloting accidentally winning a war. And why do you think it wasn't a Star Wars movie? It had the obligatory cute droids, inexperienced person on a crap world who turns out to be very strong in the force, explosions, blasters, X-wing fighters in action, and light saber fights. It looked like Star Wars to me.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Ren as the bad guy is frankly not scary.
At the start, he seems pretty scary. But the more you get to know him, the more you realize that he's not supposed to be scary. He's weak. He's a novice. It's why he doesn't really accomplish anything after interrogating Poe.
The fact even Finn could defeat a dark Lord of the sith shows how much of a joke it is.
Finn and Rey were both novices and both got one over Ren, making him effectively useless. Has there been a more ineffective villain in the history of movie making?
Um, said stormtrooper lost every lightsaber battle he entered into.
But only just. Ren is supposed to be Sith, he should be able to dispatch novices without blinking. TFA made him look useless.
Within 20 miles of my home there are 4-5 "megaplex" theaters where, for a $5 matinee ticket, you can go see the very latest movies on incredibly good screens with
If that were the case here, then I would agree. But my cheapest ticket is $20 for standard seating, or $30 for a recliner. I paid $120 for the family to see and every single one of us thought it was shit.
For $5, I'd go every week, but at these prices I'm lucky if I go once a year.
Yeah, that perfectly healthy individual bleeding everywhere, who had just fought some other dude. Wut?
"Finn, raised as a soldier his whole life, suddenly grows a conscience and quits after slaughtering a village. Doesn't stop him from killing a shitload of his old mates afterwards. Isn't he a bit too self aware?"
He says that was the first battle he's been in... which is a bit odd, as he admits to be taken as a child and trained as a soldier by the empire his whole life... yet they decided to train him for what 20-25 years prior to him seeing any action? I guess they have so many soldiers they can take their time apparently and I guess the loss of two deathstars and like 30 years of war with rebels didn't make enough of a dent to force the empire to perhaps fast track some soldiers into battle...
Also the purpose of Kylo's mask is what? To make him look and sound scary? I mean Vader had one, but that was to breath,,, If it is supposed to be just a combat helmet, why doesn't he just sound like a stormtrooper. That in itself seemed to make him a bit lame. Other possible explanations are that he is just so much of a Vader fanboi that he just "liked" it, also lame. Of course it is probably meant as some sort of stupid metaphor or something...
As for some of the things mentioned, I can forgive him wasting his mates, as it could simply be explained that they were trying to kill him first, so survival is a more a motivator than morals. As for the Kylo fight, I can excuse it, as 1) he did get his ass handed to him eventually, and 2) he is supposedly trained as a solider is whole life so has some martial training, and it does show him going up against another trooper with a melee type weapon, he perhaps also had training on, so not outrageous he might get a few lucky licks in. Also I think they made Kylo wounded to account for it also prior. Ray's 7 second jedi abs is a bit much, at least Luke had a bit of training on the falcon, and then a puppet montage later on,,,