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INH5 posted:Yes, we were never told the exact role of Alderaan in Galactic politics in ANH, but that was different because 1). we are told that Alderaan is Leia's home planet, and 2). Alderaan is where the heroes are headed with the Death Star plans, so we know that this event will necessitate a change of plans. We're given no reason to care about the Hosnian system on either a character or plot level. It's just a set of random planets that get blown up. I think it had less to do with what planets got destroyed and more to do with that Starkiller Base destroyed like, 4 or 5 of them. The act itself is supposed to horrify us as the audience. The act of genocide tends to do that. The shots of the people watching up as this creeping beam of red death approaches them. The way the camera gets nice and tight on the devastation wrought by the beam during the complete annihilation of countless billions. All of this directly proceeding a literal Hitler speech about how the New Order isn't going to exist along side something like the New Republic any longer. I don't know if we need to be given an explicit reason to care about those worlds destroyed, just the knowledge that they they weren't lightly populated, unimportant outer-rim poo poo holes. It's enough to know that the First Order targeted them to get their message across and that the Resistance (and presumably the rest of the galaxy) is horrified to see that it's come to that.
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Dec 21, 2015 21:02
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I think most of the complaints about politics in the prequels were more along the lines of it being ridiculous that a Star Wars movie was about something as banal as "taxation of trade routes," and that the political discussion scenes went on too long. The proper reaction to these criticisms is not to cut out all political exposition, to the point that the audience has no idea what is going on unless they read the EU material. I remember reading a website a few years ago advocating the "machete order" of showing the Star Wars movies to your kids or a friend who hasn't seen the movies before: ANH, ESB, AotC, RotS, RotJ, skipping The Phantom Menace entirely. One of the stated reasons was along the lines of, "The plots of Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith are driven by some systems wanting to break away from the Republic. That's a much easier conflict for kids to understand than a dispute involving taxes and trade routes."
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Dec 21, 2015 21:02
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I think a lot of the confusion about how the Resistance fits in comes from their name. They're seem more like vigilantes to me, but that doesn't sound as heroic.
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Dec 21, 2015 21:03
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net cafe scandal posted:Probably not dude. (I just wanted to show off my EU expertise  )
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Dec 21, 2015 21:04
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This was probably one of my favorite Star Wars movies, so this isn't a huge deal, but I do feel like political situation was a bit vague? I feel like it should have explained the relationship between the Republic, the Resistance, the First Order, and their rebel and imperial predecessors a bit more. Not in the sense of needing a bunch of long political negotiations or Senate debates, but more like what ANH did-- one thing ANH did really well is telling us everything we need to know to orient yourself in the setting with a combination of a few lines of sparse exposition and visual storytelling-- that the Empire is overwhelmingly powerful and the rebels are marginal and in hiding, that the Empire replaced an old Republic but its last vestiges are still being swept up, that the empire has fringes where criminality thrives and the stormtroopers have dusty armor, that Vader and his old ways are still subordinate to Tarkin and his technological arrogance. We know what Alderaan is and why it matters when it's blown up, even if we never go down to the surface and meet Jimmy Smits or whatever. And when a planet gets blown up in The Force Awakens, all I could think was, "...was that... Coruscant?" It was not. It was some other city planet with a Senate on it. And everyone seemed pretty unconcerned with the capital of the Republic being blown away? And that kind of basic information is a bit less clear in The Force Awakens? We can infer a bunch of things about the First Order just from how it looks, which I like-- somebody in one of these threads pointed out that everyone we see besides Snoke, even Hox, is very young-- too young to remember the Empire. It pushes the fascist imagery even further than the Empire did and places more importance on ceremony and spectacle, suggesting that their ideology has somehow become even more extreme. In the actual story we get a sense of how Hox, Kylo, and Snoke all relate to one another, and see the way that conformity and order has become a stated goal in and of itself. And all of that's important and good and why the First Order still mostly good villains? But it wasn't really clear just what the stakes were. Is this a cold war between sprawling rival powers going hot? Was the First Order a menacing presence slowly building its strength beyond the frontiers of a Republic that rules most of the galaxy? A fascist movement that seized power in the defeated rump of the Empire? All of those suggest that the story is about something different. All that said, "the worldbuilding was a little vague and not as elegantly conveyed as it was in A New Hope" isn't really that much of an issue in a story like Star Wars. It's hard to get too worked up about it when even The Empire Strikes Back has issues like "only two women speak in the entire movie and one of them has a single line".  In a way, all of this is less a complaint about The Force Awakens than it is just something that deepened by appreciation in how good A New Hope is at conveying its worldbuilding to an audicence who had never seen a Star War before.
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Dec 21, 2015 21:06
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Zomborgon posted:(I just wanted to show off my EU expertise You might as well put that expertise in the trash with the rest of the  EU.
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Dec 21, 2015 21:08
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The Horse in Tears posted:I think a lot of the confusion about how the Resistance fits in comes from their name. They're seem more like vigilantes to me, but that doesn't sound as heroic. The scale of everything seems kind of weird. Like I get that the Resistance is just a small offshoot of Republic loyalists who are trying to stop the First Order while the actual Republic leadership is happy to ignore them. Which is why you have a small fleet of X-Wings as your main attack force. But then the First Order has a mega-weapon which uses the power of the sun to destroy entire star systems, and it's like "well wtf is the Republic thinking letting this little rebellion get out of hand". It obviously makes for a better story to have the good guys outgunned and the bad guys seem super powerful, but you have to figure after the not-Nazis launch their first not-nuke that the not-UN is going to hopefully try to do something.
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Dec 21, 2015 21:09
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Disturbing if true that people are upset that there wasn't more political exposition in TFA. Death Star the third was unimaginative but holy crap I'm pretty sure it was not hard to piece together enough of the politics from context without them all sitting us down like the most boring children and explaining treaty status and poo poo.
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Dec 21, 2015 21:11
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Guy A. Person posted:But then the First Order has a mega-weapon which uses the power of the sun to destroy entire star systems, and it's like "well wtf is the Republic thinking letting this little rebellion get out of hand". It obviously makes for a better story to have the good guys outgunned and the bad guys seem super powerful, but you have to figure after the not-Nazis launch their first not-nuke that the not-UN is going to hopefully try to do something. Speaking of which, if the superweapon has to suck up an entire star before it can fire, then how did it fire twice? Was it in a binary star system? If so, does that mean that the First Order spent a ludicrous-even-by-Star-Wars-standards amount of money on a superweapon that only has two shots?
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Dec 21, 2015 21:17
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INH5 posted:Speaking of which, if the superweapon has to suck up an entire star before it can fire, then how did it fire twice? Was it in a binary star system? If so, does that mean that the First Order spent a ludicrous-even-by-Star-Wars-standards amount of money on a superweapon that only has two shots? Also wouldn't the gravity in the solar system get completely hosed up by removing it's sun?
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Dec 21, 2015 21:19
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INH5 posted:Speaking of which, if the superweapon has to suck up an entire star before it can fire, then how did it fire twice? Was it in a binary star system? If so, does that mean that the First Order spent a ludicrous-even-by-Star-Wars-standards amount of money on a superweapon that only has two shots? I don't think it has to, it's just that the second shot was taking up the rest of it. And the first shot blew up nearly all of their enemies so it was a pretty good shot.
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Dec 21, 2015 21:19
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INH5 posted:Speaking of which, if the superweapon has to suck up an entire star before it can fire, then how did it fire twice? Was it in a binary star system? If so, does that mean that the First Order spent a ludicrous-even-by-Star-Wars-standards amount of money on a superweapon that only has two shots? I assume the second shot finished off the sun.
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Dec 21, 2015 21:23
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I found myself thinking about that as the movie went on, and found myself in some fun places. Maybe, for example, they have to fire a shot at a precise moment in time where the loss of the gravity from a loving sun would put the planet on a trajectory to another star. I could also see it being able to warp, somehow, but discounted that due to the atmosphere the planet has and the havoc warping would reap on that.
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Dec 21, 2015 21:24
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After FTL exists science is out the window anyway, and how "realistic" or "hard" science fiction is past that point has more to do with the aesthetic that best suits the sort of story or themes you want to hit. Star Wars knows that it's best suited when spaceships swoop like WWII planes and make cool engine sounds and wizards fight one another with laser swords. Starkiller is ludicrously implausible, but its existence is IMHO completely justified by the scene introducing it-- we see what looks like an icy planet with some TIE fighters flying by, and then the camera tilts up a bit and we see a massive trench and superlaser emplacement-- an entirely visual "That's no moon, that's a space station." I loved that so much. And the conceit of the sun slowly dimming as the fight went on looked really cool, the battle of Hoth slowly transforming into the Battle of Yavin as the sky goes dark and the stars come out.
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Dec 21, 2015 21:26
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I think that sufficient information was given about the overarching political information that anyone can figure it out with a bit of thought. Not sure why folks were really confused by what was going on. I kind of like the intepretation that the new Republic learned from the lessons of the past, the failure of the Jedi, and the devastation of the clone wars and attempted to transition into a pacifist entity that would let the Empire fade away on its own, but the god damned heroes of the series are so uncomprising and bloodthirsty that they had to go and create a radical private army to keep the war going.
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Dec 21, 2015 21:30
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Yeah, speaking thematically and conceptually, the base is perfect. It's easy to understand a weak point when the planet contains the energy of, again, a loving star. Add to that all the "there's hope while there's still light" intersections with the force, and you've got yourself one good base.
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Dec 21, 2015 21:30
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Giodo! posted:I think that sufficient information was given about the overarching political information that anyone can figure it out with a bit of thought. Not sure why folks were really confused by what was going on. I kind of like the intepretation that the new Republic learned from the lessons of the past, the failure of the Jedi, and the devastation of the clone wars and attempted to transition into a pacifist entity that would let the Empire fade away on its own, but the god damned heroes of the series are so uncomprising and bloodthirsty that they had to go and create a radical private army to keep the war going. Those poor, poor Imperial Remnants, bullied by the ewil hewoes, and unable to create their weapons of mass destruction alone in peace. 
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Dec 21, 2015 21:38
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mlmp08 posted:Disturbing if true that people are upset that there wasn't more political exposition in TFA. Death Star the third was unimaginative but holy crap I'm pretty sure it was not hard to piece together enough of the politics from context without them all sitting us down like the most boring children and explaining treaty status and poo poo. Ok, go ahead.
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Dec 21, 2015 21:39
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Iceclaw posted:Those poor, poor Imperial Remnants, bullied by the ewil hewoes, and unable to create their weapons of mass destruction alone in peace. I didn't say that the First Order were the good guys.
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Dec 21, 2015 21:43
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Carrier posted:Ok, go ahead. It's starting to be done about once per page.
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Dec 21, 2015 21:44
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It would have been, or would be, interesting if The Resistance was actually resisting The New Republic. The Empire's destruction would have created a power vacuum waiting for all sorts of nefarious characters to fill it and co-opt it for their own gain, behind a guise of democracy - factions like the mercantile and banking organizations that made up The Separatists. This would create an interesting narrative where The Resistance and The First Order are fighting each-other to become the heart of The New Republic, while the banking and mercantile organizations profit from the instability and lack of oversight. This should never come to the forefront and be explained but it would be an interesting, subtle backdrop.
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Dec 21, 2015 21:45
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Rurea posted:Also wouldn't the gravity in the solar system get completely hosed up by removing it's sun? I think their exact line was that they drained the star of all its energy, which technically means they don't need to do anything else actually. If you remove the outward pressure on a star's mass from solar energy and fusion then it will collapse in on itself until it creates a black hole. Probably will take out any inhabited planets just fine. OTOH, Star Wars. DeusExMachinima fucked around with this message at 21:50 on Dec 21, 2015 |
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Dec 21, 2015 21:46
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This poster loves police brutality, but only when its against minorities!
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Rurea posted:Also wouldn't the gravity in the solar system get completely hosed up by removing it's sun? Yes, but we don't know that anyone would care about that system. DeusExMachinima posted:I think their exact line was that they drained the star of all its energy, which technically means they don't need to do anything else actually. If you remove the outward pressure on a star's mass from solar energy and fusion then it will collapse in on itself until it creates a black hole. Probably will take out any inhabited planets just fine. This is the fate of stars that don't have enough energy to go nova. They're clearly draining the star of its mass and squozing it into a space smaller than Earth, and that's crazy and unbelievable, but then so is the idea of a MIRVed hyperspace doom laser. Like the construction of the Death Star, this is a scope beyond all comprehension anyway. Even the characters who inhabited that fantastic world couldn't believe the Death Star when they saw it. Starkiller Base is really no less implausible.
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Dec 21, 2015 21:54
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The idea that this Star War is a proxy war in a larger cold war seemed pretty well-communicated to me. What is less clear is the status of the First Order compared to the rest of the galaxy. They seem small to me. Only one Star Destroyer, and only one top brass man instead of a whole conference room full (and him rather young at that). The impression is that they're upstarts, just very well-organized and ambitious bandits going around and pillaging materiel and personnel from lawless systems that the war-weary Republic and Empire cannot or will not protect.
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Dec 21, 2015 22:08
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:I haven't seen the film as of yet, but I get the impression people are being unfair to it with this "it was great, but absolutely nothing interesting happened" consensus. With the anti-goodmovie squad facing opposition from RLM, subtext-mystics, and normal people, TFA is guaranteed to join Krampus and Fury Road as a modern classic.
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Dec 21, 2015 22:12
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Bongo Bill posted:The idea that this Star War is a proxy war in a larger cold war seemed pretty well-communicated to me. What is less clear is the status of the First Order compared to the rest of the galaxy. They seem small to me. Only one Star Destroyer, and only one top brass man instead of a whole conference room full (and him rather young at that). The impression is that they're upstarts, just very well-organized and ambitious bandits going around and pillaging materiel and personnel from lawless systems that the war-weary Republic and Empire cannot or will not protect. Supposedly someone mentions that Kylo is just one of the "knights of Ren" so there must be more factions than just what we see on the Starkiller base.
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Dec 21, 2015 22:21
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INH5 posted:Speaking of which, if the superweapon has to suck up an entire star before it can fire, then how did it fire twice? Was it in a binary star system? If so, does that mean that the First Order spent a ludicrous-even-by-Star-Wars-standards amount of money on a superweapon that only has two shots? There's nothing saying Starkiller wasn't mobile like the Death Star. I simply assumed it was sitting around after absorbing a star, which it fired, then it moved to the next star to recharge. It explains why it's an ice planet with a bunch of dead trees. Nothing there to heat it up. If you treat it like a giant spaceship / space station, it explains why no one on it dies without a sun nearby to warm it.
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Dec 21, 2015 22:22
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Carrier posted:Am I the only one that thought Daisy Ridley was really poor? Absolutely. MoreLikeTen posted:She's part of my larger problem with the stormtroopers in the movie. In the opening 5 minutes they made two very bold and imo very good changes to the stormtroopers: They made them look dangerous (badass troopship shot), and they gave them the personalities of individuals (via finn). But after like ten seconds of that, they're back to cardboard cutouts with poor aim. This is also wrong, because there are several nameless stormtrooper character moments in the movie ("scavenger scum" trooper, let's go the scenic route because the boss is having a bad day troopers, the legendary TRAITORtrooper, perhaps more). The first thing you see of the troopers when they come D-Daying out onto the village is not them blasting people, but one of them dead on the ground. Every battlefield in the movie is littered with sprawled trooper corpses and it's very sad when you know what their background is. I will grant you that I thought it was weird how easily Finn killed them, but Star Wars has always been a shoot first kind of universe.
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Dec 21, 2015 22:25
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The politics of TFA are pretty easy to understand: Rebels (OT good guys, Leia's planet and some bases) kill the Emperor, Republic (main stormtrooper, grand moff force) create some form of treaty or pact to maintain stability, First Order (new bad guys) is created comprised of dissenters who want to return to a Sith dictatorship. This explains why the FO moffs, stormtroopers, ships are different from the OT; the black fighters, black uniforms, and shattered white armor with emerging black aesthetic of the stormtroopers are a form of rebellion from the "pussified" former empire force. Think KKK after the civil war. With the aid of a crazy killwizard, high-rank dissenters, and a giant ancient killwizard (and probably one of the death star plans) they create Starkiller and successfully murder everyone on the main Empire planets, tipping the scales in their favor. It's also worth noting that this is probably the first Death Star to actually fulfill its intended duty. As for Rey and Finn being boring, I have to heavily disagree there; Rey doesn't react wildly, but she's meant to fill the stoic and extra-competent half of Luke as a protagonist. Finn isn't super amazing at anything but his emotion, flaws, and general inexperience with the non-stormtrooper life makes him at being the audience insert and acting as the "heart" of the group. And Chewbacca is probably going to take a larger role in this trilogy considering what he manages to do, what happens in the film, and the glut of scenes he gets. Who doesn't love Chewie?
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Dec 21, 2015 22:36
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Some writer really loved the bowcaster. It was practically a character in and of itself.
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Dec 21, 2015 22:38
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Vishass posted:I walked out after someone hyperspace jumped within a gravity well Yeah, this was totally loving Abrams-stupid.
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Dec 21, 2015 22:41
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mlmp08 posted:Some writer really loved the bowcaster. It was practically a character in and of itself. Probably JJ.
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Dec 21, 2015 22:43
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BB-8 was cute as hell and the scene where he responds to Finn's thumbs-up by giving his own with a lighter made the entire theater (me included) laugh If for no other scene, that sold me on Finn and Magnet-Droid.
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Dec 21, 2015 22:51
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This movie reminded me of something I've really liked about Star Wars in general, and this movie was no exception: I love how clunky yet durable Star Wars tech is. On the one hand, getting blasted in the rear end by a TIE Fighter will more often than not mean an X-Wing gets wrecked. On the other, the tech is sturdy enough for poo poo like the Millenium Falcon surviving some laser/blaster hits, it can scrape against poo poo without them instantly bemoaning hull breaches and getting sucked out of ports, and so on. Even the Star Destroyer that crashed on Jakku has a more or less in tact hull. It lets them do some really fun and goofy stunts without worrying about the fragility of a spacecraft or aircraft the way real-world stuff works or sci-fi stuff like Interstellar, Sunshine, etc. It's refreshing to see a movie that takes place in large part in space or foreign planets where they don't have to dedicate several minutes to space suits and atmosphere checks and poo poo. The throwback dumb-as-gently caress oxygen masks in TFA were great. I remember even as a kid being like "what?!" when they just throw on glorified oxygen masks from an EMT's kit before strolling around on an asteroid in Episode V, but gently caress it. Star Wars doesn't have time for breathable atmosphere being a problem or explaining blast door lockdowns due to decompression.
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Dec 21, 2015 22:56
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MrMojok posted:Yeah, this was totally loving Abrams-stupid. How does hyperspace travel work, such that it makes this impossible?
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Dec 21, 2015 22:58
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Thats another thing I liked, that the Millenium Falcon just kept belly flopping onto sand dunes and poo poo. Really made the thing feel like a big powerful piece of crap.
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Dec 21, 2015 22:59
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net cafe scandal posted:Thats another thing I liked, that the Millenium Falcon just kept belly flopping onto sand dunes and poo poo. Really made the thing feel like a big powerful piece of crap. Yup. Also I like that, just as the dogfighting is inspired by WW2 fighters, in Star War universe they have bonkers hyperspace, space-wizards, laser weapons, world destroyers, and so forth, but their scanning/intel tech is so poo poo that it just makes sense that they go guns blazing into dumbass assaults whose planning looks utterly loving idiotic compared to present-day US operations. Leads to some haphazard and fun battles rather than either technobabble or grimdark tactical poo poo.
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Dec 21, 2015 23:03
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I also like how Star Wars forgets how computers work and nobody thinks of making a copy of the map.
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Dec 21, 2015 23:05
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Interesting tidbit for those of you who watched the Clone Wars animated series. From The Force Awakens visual dictionary, the planet that the Starkiller base was built into was actually Illum. RIP lightsaber crystals.
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Dec 21, 2015 23:05
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Kurzon posted:I also like how Star Wars forgets how computers work and nobody thinks of making a copy of the map. R2 made a copy but that's because he's enlightened. No Star War has ever taken place during an information age, however, and that's good.
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Dec 21, 2015 23:10
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