Star Wars
(Spoilers under a cut.)
We went to see Star Wars yesterday, me having been talked into it by a Star Wars-obsessed coworker who promised me that it's much more like the original films and not much like the prequels. And she was right; the feel of it is right, and there's a lot of interesting stories and backstories. There are some completely awesome new characters (the 2 major protags and the main droid are all fantastic, and the principal baddie is flawed and fascinating).
I find that a film needs to be really extremely engaging to get me to shut off my internal critic, and this was not quite that engaging. Here are the things I was thinking, some of which may be spoilery:
There are a lot more women in the cast than in the original films. That translates to maybe 1/10 of the crowd scenes being female (another 1/10th or so is alien). There's a similar gender split in the speaking roles. Men have approximately all the good jobs (aliens have approximately none of the good jobs, but this is very biased by the First Order being obvious Nazis in disguise so probably they have astoundingly terrible hiring policies and pat themselves on the backs about diversity if one of their cleaners is non-human). In terms of gender it's like the very worst bits of academia. Do you think the whatever-the-new-Death-Star's-called has an Athena Swan equivalent? Whether it passes the Bechdel test is arguable (there's a conversation between Rey and Maz Kanata that's only mostly about Luke), and it appears to be compulsory for all female characters to wear lipstick, even if they're ancient shrivelled aliens or spend all their lives slaving away in a desert.
The actual plot is very much a "greatest hits of Star Wars" plot. I could have used more new stuff, like maybe a principal plot point that doesn't involve exploiting an obvious flaw in a giant death sphere to blow it up, haven't we done that twice already? The execution of the ideas is good though; the crises feel new and important to the characters. The stuff that's not the actual plot - off-screen politics, the characters, their motivations, back-stories, and interactions, etc. - is all great and I look forward to finding out more about all these things. I am very pleased with the decision to set the film 30 years after the original trilogy and have actually older versions of Han, Leia, and Luke. Rey and Finn are both utterly awesome, BB-8 is the cutest, and I sincerely hope we see more of the brilliant Maz Kanata. Kylo Ren/Ben Solo is clearly trying to be a cookie-cutter baddie like Darth Vader and failing, and the failing is really interesting. (Also now Luke is not the only character with a boring Earth name.)
Scale, time, space are all wrong. Everything feels to small for an entire galaxy, and I do not know how the location of the map fragment (within the galactic map, not the location of the memory stick it was on) can possibly have been a mystery. Are there no data managers in the Star Wars universe? Surely it couldn't take more than 10 minutes to map the fragment onto a galactic map (probably without even any swearing). The scene where R2D2 and BB8 hold up the two bits of the map and the film tries to develop some dramatic tension about whether they will be able to piece together a 2-piece toddler jigsaw is laughable. People are forever turning up to exactly the right place in a planet to fight a war with a handful of flghter planes and a detachment of Stormtroopers. The map aside, the most jarring consequence for me was that the good guys are forever saying "you run away and hide, I'll cover you" whilst in the middle of an extensive forest on a planet they don't know and then having zero problems finding each other again later.
Much of it is going to look fantastic in the Lego games.
Rey's actress (or Rey's stunt double, maybe) actually knows how to climb!
I am delighted to discover that what a Stormtrooper wears under their armour looks exactly like what simont wears all the time.
So in summary, I'm glad I went to see it, and I plan to see the next 2 as well (contrast the prequels where I didn't bother with 2 and 3).
More interesting and spoileriffic discussion here:
http://theweaselking.livejournal.com/4725564.html
http://theferrett.livejournal.com/2036763.html
The other thing that was notable was that about 50% of the adverts were for computer games. I have no TV and usually only see films at the film festival, where there are no adverts. Are we mainstream now? Cool, I think?
comments at Dreamwidth
We went to see Star Wars yesterday, me having been talked into it by a Star Wars-obsessed coworker who promised me that it's much more like the original films and not much like the prequels. And she was right; the feel of it is right, and there's a lot of interesting stories and backstories. There are some completely awesome new characters (the 2 major protags and the main droid are all fantastic, and the principal baddie is flawed and fascinating).
I find that a film needs to be really extremely engaging to get me to shut off my internal critic, and this was not quite that engaging. Here are the things I was thinking, some of which may be spoilery:
There are a lot more women in the cast than in the original films. That translates to maybe 1/10 of the crowd scenes being female (another 1/10th or so is alien). There's a similar gender split in the speaking roles. Men have approximately all the good jobs (aliens have approximately none of the good jobs, but this is very biased by the First Order being obvious Nazis in disguise so probably they have astoundingly terrible hiring policies and pat themselves on the backs about diversity if one of their cleaners is non-human). In terms of gender it's like the very worst bits of academia. Do you think the whatever-the-new-Death-Star's-called has an Athena Swan equivalent? Whether it passes the Bechdel test is arguable (there's a conversation between Rey and Maz Kanata that's only mostly about Luke), and it appears to be compulsory for all female characters to wear lipstick, even if they're ancient shrivelled aliens or spend all their lives slaving away in a desert.
The actual plot is very much a "greatest hits of Star Wars" plot. I could have used more new stuff, like maybe a principal plot point that doesn't involve exploiting an obvious flaw in a giant death sphere to blow it up, haven't we done that twice already? The execution of the ideas is good though; the crises feel new and important to the characters. The stuff that's not the actual plot - off-screen politics, the characters, their motivations, back-stories, and interactions, etc. - is all great and I look forward to finding out more about all these things. I am very pleased with the decision to set the film 30 years after the original trilogy and have actually older versions of Han, Leia, and Luke. Rey and Finn are both utterly awesome, BB-8 is the cutest, and I sincerely hope we see more of the brilliant Maz Kanata. Kylo Ren/Ben Solo is clearly trying to be a cookie-cutter baddie like Darth Vader and failing, and the failing is really interesting. (Also now Luke is not the only character with a boring Earth name.)
Scale, time, space are all wrong. Everything feels to small for an entire galaxy, and I do not know how the location of the map fragment (within the galactic map, not the location of the memory stick it was on) can possibly have been a mystery. Are there no data managers in the Star Wars universe? Surely it couldn't take more than 10 minutes to map the fragment onto a galactic map (probably without even any swearing). The scene where R2D2 and BB8 hold up the two bits of the map and the film tries to develop some dramatic tension about whether they will be able to piece together a 2-piece toddler jigsaw is laughable. People are forever turning up to exactly the right place in a planet to fight a war with a handful of flghter planes and a detachment of Stormtroopers. The map aside, the most jarring consequence for me was that the good guys are forever saying "you run away and hide, I'll cover you" whilst in the middle of an extensive forest on a planet they don't know and then having zero problems finding each other again later.
Much of it is going to look fantastic in the Lego games.
Rey's actress (or Rey's stunt double, maybe) actually knows how to climb!
I am delighted to discover that what a Stormtrooper wears under their armour looks exactly like what simont wears all the time.
So in summary, I'm glad I went to see it, and I plan to see the next 2 as well (contrast the prequels where I didn't bother with 2 and 3).
More interesting and spoileriffic discussion here:
http://theweaselking.livejournal.com/4725564.html
http://theferrett.livejournal.com/2036763.html
The other thing that was notable was that about 50% of the adverts were for computer games. I have no TV and usually only see films at the film festival, where there are no adverts. Are we mainstream now? Cool, I think?
comments at Dreamwidth