They sent all the X-Wings they had, which was not many X-Wings. The Resistance is basically paid like JC Denton.

Han’s seen the Bowcaster fire, but he’s never used it, and most of the time it was firing previously he had other things to pay attention to.

Don’t remember this bit too well, so no comment.

Yes. The planets exploding without comment was weird and dumb. On the other hand, how it fired death lasers was fine.

R2 clearly activated because he found out Han was dead and he’d had a grudge against him for over a decade leading to a vow of silence. (BB8 acted nothing like R2, so that plot twist would be really stupid.)

Most of those are minor enough they didn’t impact my enjoyment at all, and what was there was mostly good, so, yes. The Force Awakens is fun, and I’m sorry you didn’t like it. Takes all kinds to make a world, I suppose.

Given the time gap story-wise, the writing throughout seemed lazy as hell.

What did strike me as really odd was that Kylo didn’t use the force while he was fighting. I mean, he knocked Rey away at the beginning of the fight, but the moment someone shows a lightsaber, he seems to be incapable of using the force against them. I seem to remember that you can’t use the force on another force user, but that doesn’t seem to be the case,

I will be very surprised if they go that route. I’m pretty sure his getting slightly mangled in the fight and the comment about completing his training is for the sake of bringing him back later as a badder bad guy.

@verendus:
“…the first hit landed is also the last.”
I dunno, that sounds pretty dangerous to me.

I thought some of the scenes with Han were well done, but he needed more time to talk and less doing action things, and less screen time total, as they should have been developing the characters that we’ve never met before. I agree that the part where confronts Kylo is interesting, but frankly I think it’s so far outside his regular MO, that they should have played up his hesitance more.

I thought Kylo was an interesting character, but an incredibly poor villain. If they were going to make him just as they did, they needed a stronger, more present villain, beyond the holographic Voldemort/Palpatine hybrid.

What bothers me is that the ways in which they copied the originals are the very superficial ways you already mentioned, without copying the bits that made them good movies to begin with.

For instance, A New Hope was filled with witty banter and quips by people who didn’t get along at all but were forced by circumstances to cooperate, which is how they gradually get to be friends. By contrast, the new characters all like each other instantly, and never have any meaningful tension, even when Finn comes clean about being a stormtrooper. Rey shows no sign of caring, everyone trusts him immediately, and the whole issue quietly disappears. Except for a couple dudes calling him a traitor, though I don’t know how they recognize him.

The original series establishes Darth Vader early on as an imposing figure who kills Luke’s master, and it takes Luke three whole movies of experience and training to finally defeat him. Rey kicks the crap out of Kylo the very first time she picks up a light saber, and even Finn is able to fight him for a bit. If being crappy at what he does is part of Kylo’s character in the movie, then that’s fine, but structurally it is a terrible choice to present him as the main antagonist. IMO, a powerful almost invincible villain is about half of the Star Wars formula.

Basically, this ended up being an action movie with some good ideas in it, but not enough character development and too much time spent on shallow throwbacks. All that screen time should have instead gone to the main new characters, to give them enough writing to actually sell their relationships to each other. And Kylo’s master should have been an active participant in the action and story, perhaps a masked, Vader-esque figure, driving Kylo along in person, and finishing the fights he couldn’t handle. I also would’ve liked to cut out about half of the long, silent stares in the movie, and given a couple lines to Mark Hamill at the end.

I really liked Finn and Kylo, because they’re characters we don’t see much of. Finn’s main motivation is to run away as far as possible. Kylo’s this arrogant, punk-ass kid, and the arrogance is actually WHY he’s a bad guy, rather than something that makes him cool and edgy – he has temper tantrums and waves his lightsaber around flashily and even the guys on his side are tired of him. His “let’s just capture Rey and read her mind plan” turned out to make things worse for everyone. That sort of self-destructiveness being presented as something bad, rather than something good, makes the story seem much more human.

I also really loved the duel at the end. Everyone kept getting nicked and scratched but kept on fighting. Compare to the fights from every other movie, where the first hit landed is also the last. Made everything feel much more real and dangerous to actually see them getting hurt during the fight.

At the end of the film it is mentioned that Kylo Ren needs to complete his training with Snoke. I think it’s pretty clear he is NOT very powerful – or at least not very well trained. A lot of his scenes seem to show him trying to appear more powerful than he is. Even the helmet is him covering up his very unthreatening appearance! I suspect this is building up to Kylo returning to the light in the next movie while a good character (probably Rey) falls to the dark side and ends up as the final villain.

I’m definitely in that group that feels a nameless stirring when Han Solo gets his ship back, so the nostalgia trip resonated for me. I didn’t feel it to be overdone, but again, I’m the target audience for said trip.

I do think it is the first Star Wars movie that actually feels TOO fast-paced at times. Case in point: David’s issue with how little attention was paid to the planets that were destroyed. I was kind of a spoiler fiend in the lead-up to the movie, and apparently a number of scenes were shot that took place earlier, showing clearly that those planets are the seat of the New Republic Senate; the woman who looms largest in frame during the planets’ reaction to the incoming death ray was to be Leia’s right hand. I’m sure that senate politics were a scary proposition to tackle in a post-prequel film, which may explain why they were cut. But overall I’d actually like to see an expanded cut of the film that fleshes a few of the beats out a bit more [my group also caught David’s point about R2 waking up because the plot told him to].

I’ll be seeing it again.

I’m hoping Kylo’s terrible performance in saber fights (even the friggin Stormtrooper gets a hit in) is somehow fleshed out in his backstory – maybe he went nuts before he got any real training, and his saber is almost like a vanity thing he never really earned. I can imagine Luke’s school of teaching would probably leave the fun stuff for later.

I enjoyed it, too. It succeeded pretty well on its characters and their relationships, avoiding the longstanding “a bit wooden” complaint about Star Wars.

That said, it skimped on the details a bit more than I thought was right. Two main bits which I wondered about during the film rather than afterwards:

1. When the starkiller was fired, after the big Nazi speech, what planets were destroyed? The speech made it sound like they’d be attacking the Republic senate… but surely that’d be more explicit, and probably not in the same system as that dive bar the heroes went to ground in?

2. Why did R2D2 wake up right then? What triggered that? It was a bit deus-ex-machina-y, and a single line of dialogue about “he says Luke told him to wait until a Force user appeared who’d really need training” would have fixed it.

Namely, when those monsters were let loose in the freight halls. They fit perfectly in the halls, which all look the same. Close doors to section them off, let loose to kill AI, etc. Kind of like that boulder maze in the intro of Ocarina of Time?

Another part was Poe firing off the 4 cores in the starkiller, doing a lateral roll within the cylinder while picking each one off. It felt like a mission from several Star Fox entries, or even the final level of Shadows of the Empire (N64).

Not that these weren’t entertaining, but my mind immediately went to “this is just a videogame, and is shot like a videogame, and blows up like a videogame”.

(I was fine, I’ve seen the movie and also clicked through anyways)