Star Wars Episode 7 and Disney buy Lucas Film

[Mikey]

Saw it last night. I used to be quite a big Star Wars fan and still have a lot of affection for it, and have many boxes of that in the attic. That love wained with the prequels so my investment in Ep VII wasn't what it might have been, so I was approaching it with, I won't say low expectations, but will say a level head. I was concerned that two or so hours of it might be too much.

I loved it. Found it fun from start to finish, loved Rey and Finn especially, and gawped appreciatively at the tech and dogfights. I don't know if it was a good film or just a good Star Wars film, but it was as I've said great entertainment - as it should be for stuff like this. I might even go and see it again!

[Adrian Bamforth]

I liked it [spoiler]more when it was called Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope.

Unfortunately, I still can't think of a single thing in the film which wasn't a mashup of elements from the first three films: Dark side Skywalker who wears a black mask, mysterious deformed master who appears by videolink, young Jedi discovering their powers, rebel information contained in droid, family crisis on bridge, Death Star weapon with vulnerable spot, rebel briefing, diminutive mentor, sleazy alien bar, inherited weapon, planets destroyed to send message, showdown hallucination, remote Jedi master... the most original elements were the reformed stormtrooper, which they have yet to elaborate on, and the villain being seen to be suffering pain, which felt more effective than Anakin's transformation.

The plot piled coincidence on coincidence... and exactly why do the Skywalkers keep having kids?

Star Wars was a blind spot in my childhood so I don't have the giddy feeling when I see the old toys come to life, and I'm not particularly into martial arts and combat scenes. Everything in the film looked great and tactile. I'm just disappointed that Abrams decided to carry on exactly where we left off rather than start with a new seed and a new foe... I mean, was there not a victory at the end of episode 6? It looks like everyone pretty much just carried on as they always had. I have to say, it made me appreciate George Lucas' vision with the prequels, even if he was punching above his weight in the directing and writing; I would have preferred to have seen those films made with these production values.

Lucas told Abrams he makes the best films he can rather than the films the fans want. I'm with him on that.[/spoiler]

[shaolin_monkey]

Enjoyable enough, but hard to describe without spoilers.

I guess it was like putting on a pair of comfortable slippers, only to find them a bit worn, full of holes, and smelling slightly of regurgitated cheese.

[auxlen]

Saw it last night. I used to be quite a big Star Wars fan and still have a lot of affection for it, and have many boxes of that in the attic. That love wained with the prequels so my investment in Ep VII wasn't what it might have been, so I was approaching it with, I won't say low expectations, but will say a level head. I was concerned that two or so hours of it might be too much.

The above post sums up where I was before seeing it although (replace wained with shriveled up and died. I HATED the prequels) I was secretly hopeful.
I loved it to and [spoiler]even teared up twice[/spoiler]

my standout character was Kylo Ren. [spoiler]Everybody was worried that he would just be a pale Darth Vader and so they had the character worry about that, too (and thus the actor). tremendous performance.[/spoiler]

[spoiler]The lightsabre fights were brutal and thrilling. no dancing around like dancers just two people trying to fuck each other up!!![/spoiler]

[Mikey]

Heh! I was being generous - it was more like I took my SW fandom out the back and shot it in the head, then dismembered it before burning the remains and pissing on the fire. So liking TFA is a big move!

And yes, the saber battles were great,[spoiler]especially Rey and Kylo, though I was urging her to force choke the piss out of him![/spoiler]

[Hawkmumbler]

Hammy as a sandwich but I bloody loved it.

[TordelBack]

Yeah, Kylo was the movie's big surprise for me - [spoiler]stonking villain, whose inadequacies only made him more terrifying,  and really everything Anakin should have been in Episode III. I love it when you just wish someone, anyone, would kill the bastard - [/spoiler]that's the mark of a good baddie.

[radiator]

So, who else thought we'd have had a much better film if they'd cut the [spoiler]Death Star/Starkiller[/spoiler] plot entirely? Most of the film's problems seemed to all come back to its inclusion. It felt totally extraneous to me, it wasn't built up or established very well at all, didn't really have the dramatic weight it needed, and even the characters in the film seemed to be rolling their eyes and just going through the motions.

To my mind, this film really shone when the scale was kept small. I pretty much loved the first hour without reservation, getting to know Finn and Rey and getting reacquainted with Han and Chewie, but when they started to expand the scale and bring in the Resistance and the First Order proper is for me when they started to lose control of the story. I would pinpoint [spoiler]the destruction of that random planet/Republic(?)[/spoiler] as the exact moment that the wheels really came off the plot for me. As TB says, there simply isn't enough context given to understand these different factions, their relative scales etc in the same way we can innately understand the relationship between the Empire and the Rebel Alliance in the original trilogy. It raises far too many questions that are never answered.

An ending that just had Finn, Han and Chewie [spoiler]breaking in to, for example, Kylo Ren's personal base or Star Destroyer to rescue Rey and recover the map* while Poe led a diversionary attack[/spoiler] would have made for an infinitely better ending imo, but I guess we need to have a [spoiler]bigger Death Star so we can have an even bigger ending with more empty spectacle[/spoiler].

If they'd have cut it entirely, the film wouldn't have felt quite so dizzyingly fast and overstuffed, and we could have had a bit more development of the leads, who despite being likable, are arguably a touch bland. Yes, they're good guys, but it's really only Finn who has any idiosyncrasies or flaws. Poe and Rey are a little Mary Sue-ish. I really hope we get to know them a bit better in the next film.

Overall, the script felt three or four drafts away from being properly finished, and occasionally the film had a weird choppy feel to it, like you could really easily tell that certain things had been cut, or moved around in the plot. It felt rushed, often muddled, and it also felt repetitive, not just of other Star Wars films, but repetitive even of itself. For example the plot beats of 'go here, First Order show up, escape/get captured/escape again, go somewhere else, First Order show up....'.

*[spoiler]The map concept has to be an Abrams invention, surely? I remember hearing somewhere that the Macguffin would simply be Luke's lightsaber, and this is what everyone was after, and what was hidden in BB-8. The map is such a monumentally clumsy plot contrivance (in a film stuffed full of them). Who made it? Why? And why, in a truly maddening moment of narrative idiocy, does R2 suddenly have it at the end of the film for no reason whatsoever?[/spoiler]

Another example - [spoiler]Rey finding the Falcon.[/spoiler] I thought this was a bit of a stretch, but trusted the film to come back and explain this incredible coincidence later [spoiler](ie, that Rey was the daughter of Han and Leia, which I am almost certain she was in a previous draft of the script)[/spoiler], but no, it's never explained.

[spoiler]It's also more than a little aggravating that so many of the most iconic, tantalising moments from the trailer are either dream sequences or do not appear in the final film at all.[/spoiler]

I know all that makes it sound like I didn't like the film (and all my friends think I'm an idiot for pointing these things out because 'it has lightsabers and spaceships - it doesn't have to make sense') but as I say there were so many wonderful moments it won me over. It's just the connective tissue holding them all together is really dodgy at times. The humour throughout was really welcome too. It rode the line between being funny and too big and broad, but stayed just the right side of it imo.

Kylo Ren, though. Great villain. Best character in a film of great characters. As someone else said, [spoiler]he could have easily been a weak copy of Vader, but they somehow managed to turn this quality into a virtue. As others have noted, he packs more pain, rage, torment and pathos into his 15-20 minutes of screentime than Lucas managed with Anakin in six hours. Big thumbs up, and I'm thrilled he'll (apparently?) be returning for the next one.[/spoiler]

Finn is a very close second  - Moses did good, and even his American accent sounded good to my ears. [spoiler]Because of a certain shot in the trailer I was convinced he was going to die at the end, and my heart was genuinely pounding because I desperately wanted him to make it,[/spoiler] so to get that reaction out of me the film must have been doing a lot right.

So all in all, a real mixed bag. So much good and so much bad that I'm finding it hard to form a concrete opinion on it.

[Zenith 666]

Went to see it last night loved it.[spoiler]until it broke my bloody heart.its just a flesh wound right.i hate you JJ you murdering bastard.[/spoiler]

[shaolin_monkey]

Sorry, Kylo Ren was [spoiler] a Lawrence Llewelyn-Bowen lookalike crossed with an Emo kid with anger issues. I thought the performance was dull and uninteresting, and the character didn't grip me at all. [/spoiler]

[TordelBack]

Spot on there Radiator - the Starkiller was a complete waste of time as a subplot, and it made pretty much no sense in action. [spoiler]Apparently Maz's castle is in the Hosnian system too, along with the entire 'New Republic' (whatever that is, or was), since you could see the planet and its moons blowing up in its daytime sky - hell of a coincidence, that.  Exactly like Vulcan and Scotty's ice-moon, when you think about it. 

Abrams' efforts in this particular regard equal Lucas' in RotS - the key questions are all hand-waved to get us to the desired setup. 'What happened to Padme?' ' She just died'. 'How did Obi-Wan defeat Anakin?' ' He had the high ground'. 'How come there are stormtroopers everywhere again?' 'There just are'. ' What happened to that Republic the rebels were fighting to restore?' 'It blew up, round about the halfway mark'. This is the same kind of weak teleological storytelling that ruined the Prequels, and I wasn't happy to see it again. Hopefully Lucas can take some satisfaction in seeing the same technical pitfalls crop up again in the narrative, while the continuation of his Skywalker family saga remains the movie's strength.

Happily, the character work was way stronger than anything Lucas gave us in the last three - Han in particular was utterly convincing as a man whose life has imploded, reverting to the ways of his youth.  The tragic pre-figuring in his insistence that he can talk his way out of anything was especially nicely done, and for all the overwrought scene setting of his end, I believed it completely. I had been dreading that moment for 2 years, but it worked and it was fine.[/spoiler]

[JamesC]

Oh don't all start moaning about it. Fucking hell!

[TordelBack]

If I find something disappointing I'm going to say so. I've also covered what I liked, which was a lot, but equally there's a good deal that doesn't work for me at all. This may change on future viewings, but for now, well, it's a curate's egg. 

[ThryllSeekyr]

Still a opinion based on not seeing the film yet!

Never liked the idea that Kylo Ren copies Vader's appearance, but add's a different spin or twist to it.

What if he wore the exact same armour, would that be bad?

Disrespectful?

Confusing?

Stupid?

[shaolin_monkey]

Oh don't all start moaning about it. Fucking hell!

I enjoyed it, and am taking the kids to see it tomorrow. It's definitely better than the prequels, and is often exciting and funny. It's just a bit... samey.