Star Wars: The Force Awakens
First things first: I loved the movie. Period. If you hated it, that's fine, but I'm going to ask that you keep the negativity off of my journal.
I definitely liked Finn, Poe, and Rey as the new trio, although I would have liked to see more interaction between all three of them rather than it being pretty much entirely split into interactions between Finn/Poe and Finn/Rey. Hopefully that will happen more in the next two films?
IMO at least, Kylo Ren works quite well as the successor to Darth Vader (and was a nice little nod to the EU). It would be nice if his character is expanded on a bit more in the future, though, to give us a better idea of exactly how things went wrong. Although I asked the same thing about Darth Vader when I was younger, and look what that got us.
I've seen some people saying that they didn't like that it was thirty years later and things were still so... well, so bad. Maybe it's the fact that I'm a millennial, but that didn't bother me much because, from my experience, that's been how the world works. Time passes, life gets better for the older generations, and the younger generation ends up having to work twice as hard to get half as much. Nothing really ever gets better.
On the 'shipping front, it was a bit of a roller coaster. I think that my thoughts we something along the lines of this:
"Ooh, slash! I can live with slash. Or het. I'm suddenly seeing het. Het works. Oh, we're back to the slash. Wait, there's the het again. Slash! Het! Slash? Het? Fuck it, OT3 worked for the original trilogy, so it sure as hell can work for this one as well. And, hey, maybe it won't end up having surprise!incest this time although anything's possible."
That said, the Han/Leia 'shipper in me is more than a little sad that we didn't get one last kiss, especially since the two of them had obviously been separated for some time. And that scene where Leia knew he was gone basically broke my heart.
(As did Chewie watching him fall, but that's probably a given.)
Speaking of which...
Going in, I should probably say that I was spoiled for Han's death. Not the details or anything, just that he died. There had been some speculation about it recently, so I specifically asked someone who I knew would be seeing the movie before me to spoil that one part. I've done the same thing for other movies in the past, as well as for TV shows. It's one thing if it's a new character dying, but if it's an already established character then I need to know in advance.
Anyway, knowing what was coming (although not when or how it would be coming, at least not until closer to the end when things became a bit more telegraphed), the similarities between Obi-Wan in Episode IV and Han in Episode VII were, well, pretty damn obvious to me. I'm kind of curious if they were quite so noticeable if you didn't know that part going in, though.
I definitely want to see the movie a few more times, although that might have to wait until I'm in Tennessee as the next few days are pretty much completely booked for me. It definitely felt like Star Wars, though, in a way that the prequels really didn't for me. (The movies, at least. The cartoon series based on the prequels have honestly felt more like Star Wars than the movies themselves, at least to me.)
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