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Loved the film. I don’t think Rey is Luke’s daughter (or Han and Leia’s) but I’d be willing to bet she’s Obi Wan’s granddaughter. I swear I heard his voice when Rey ran from the lightsaber vision.
Something that is bugging me — the set up for Han’s death, and Abrams habit of ‘resurrecting’ characters. We saw Poe ‘come back from the dead’ and then there’s that long, long catwalk with the rest of the protagonists looking down on the confrontation — I can’t shake the feeling that Han is going to do a Gandalf.
I also think that Snokes = Palpatine, who seems to have as many lives as Voldemort…
@Lori Coulson: Yes, after a lifetime of superhero comics and other serial adventure fiction my immediate thought was that if there’s no body it doesn’t count. 🙂
I suspect that Han is exactly as dead as the fortunes of the new franchise and Ford and his agent decide. Which may really be dead. But may not. He is Shrodinger’s Icon.
I was planning to see the movie on December 25, followed by Chinese food (because the preceding weather was too crappy [i.e. no snow] for my other December 25 custom), but hadn’t slept well the night before, and decided to skip it.
Several days later, we saw the 3D version at our local theater, and I thought that the 3D was fairly well done; I didn’t realize, until reading the comments here, that this was a retro-fit, and that it wasn’t shot in stereo, which makes me very impressed by the advances in simulated stereo.
I enjoyed the film, mostly, but thought that it had too much in the way of nods and winks and “see what we did here?” references to the earlier films. But I didn’t find myself caring much about any of the characters, and I’m amazed that commenters here remember so many of the characters’ names. Part way through, in what I think was the first third or so of the movie, when what’s-her-name-the-young-female-heroine and what’s-his-name-the-black-guy(and why does a sanitation engineer get armor and a blaster???) were embracing and saying goodbye (just before the lightsaber-induced hallucination?), I realized that I had zoned out a bit and wasn’t sure where they were or how they had gotten there, and that I didn’t really need to know, because this was more about special effects and space battles and the search for Luke MacGuffinWalker, or possibly about finding the map to MacGuffin’s World where Luke was hiding.
I’ll probably see the rest of the movies, if they get made, because I’ve seen all of the others, and I want to find out whether that embrace between Carrie Fisher and Young Female was a mother/daughter hug. But if they don’t get made in my lifetime, I won’t feel as if I’ve missed anything important.
I might even go and see this one again, on a larger screen, in 2-D, and when I’m feeling more awake, if I have a free morning.
Which came first, the Jedi or the Force?
Ooh, yes. The most recent time we saw it (three times so far), there was a father and roughly five- or six-year-old son sitting behind us. (No, I didn’t ask how old he was; I’m going on general demeanor and how many times he kicked the back of my frelling seat.) There was at least one point — I think when Rey force-pulled the lightsaber to her — when dad muttered (loudly enough I could hear it clearly) “She’s a Jedi!”
And I bit my tongue not to say “No! No, she’s not! ‘Jedi’ means a member of the Jedi order. There are far more Force-sensitive and Force-talented people out there than there are Jedi!” (Because during a movie, that would be obnoxious. And after the movie, that would be embarrassingly detail-freaky. Erf.)
after a lifetime of superhero comics and other serial adventure fiction my immediate thought was that if there’s no body it doesn’t count.
There’s been some good discussion over on MetaFilter. As one commenter pointed out
Note: I have no opinion on this. Is Han dead? That’s good for certain emotional and storytelling purposes. Is he alive? That’s good for other emotional and storytelling purposes. I liked TFA enough to be willing to extend benefit of the doubt to the filmmakers again, which I wasn’t willing to do for a very long time.
I was looking at my DVD storage and realized that I’ve never bothered to buy the prequels… I guess that they just weren’t “my” Star Wars.
jayn said:
I’ll grant you that, but he’s definitely Jeff Goldblum cosplaying Snape.
Lexica quoted:
My SO points out that the person is usually mostly dead anyway by the time they go into the pit, and the pit is just to make extra sure.
Ford, negotiating with Abrams:
I want out. Kill Han.
OK, we’ll gut you with a light saber.
Not good enough, they cauterize.
How about we drop you off a really high bridge into a chasm?
No way! McKellen got dragged back after that–for five more movies.
[Sigh] Fine. Then we’ll burn up the chasm with you in it.
Oh, come on! You brought Vader back from a VOLCANO.
Right, then. We’ll blow up the whole damned planet with you in it. Will that do?
Do it all. All of it. Then I’ll think about it. Let me see the script first.
I haven’t read the rest of the comments here yet, but I juat want to post these thoughts while I have ’em.
Loved the film. Hit the ground running, and I didn’t mind it hitting all those old plot beats because it ditched so much of the childishness Lucas liked so much.
But.
Finn. How does he go from a ruthlessly conditioned stormtrooper to a cheering escapee happily blasting his fellow conditioned slavetroopers to pieces? He seems traumatised by the death of his friend at the start, haunted by the massacre – but there seem to be no lingering after-effects, no sense of trauma, no sense of being haunted and most important, no sense of struggle to overcome a lifetime of brainwashing. I did love the character, but that seamless transition – which includes slaughtering fellow kidnap-and-brainwash victims with nary a twinge of conscience – nagged. All the more so since it would seem a natural, almost seamless reflection of Kylo Ren’s struggle to be bad. (I thought Kylo Ren was great – I gather this is not necessarily a universally held opinion?) I think having one of your main characters angsting about this was maybe seen as more of a risk than just having him leap feet first into adventure? John Boyega would have acted the hell out of, though.
I like Kylo Ren, but he’s not all that charismatic. Pitiful, scary, tragic – but he’s no Darth Vader.
@Anna Feruglio Dal Dan
Being “no Darth Vader” seems to be a big part of his problem….
And he’s going to be so damn pathetic when Snookums/Palpatine offs him in Episode 9…
Hmmm… here is an interesting spoiler discussion on Finn’s potential origins.
A couple of Star Wars-related things that have recently made me happy:
Jimmy Fallon, the Roots, and the cast of TFA sing the Star Wars medley a capella. So good. The interaction between the people in different squares is delightful.
there’s nothing I don’t like about this picture. (In an effort not to be tedious, I will skip squeeing over the individual elements I love in this photo. There are lots.)
The thread about TFA over on Making Light has had some excellent discussion of motivations, possible backstories, potential developments, and more. (The discussion on MetaFilter has been pretty good too, but at its current 2000+ comments and 225K+ words, it’s well into “epic” territory.)
I just stumbled upon this awesome footage of Carrie Fisher roasting George Lucas at his AFI Life Achievement Award presentation. What a riot.
I’m pretty intrigued by this idea — Snoke is a ghost.
@Morris Keesan: From my take of the movie, the destruction of the village was apparently Finn’s first real action as a stormtrooper. Maybe he was recently promoted from being a sanitation engineer.
So Max von Sydow lives on the same planet as Rey and he also has the map to Luke Skywalker. The logical conclusion is that he is on the planet because he is monitoring Rey on behalf of Luke.
@Hampus:
The opening scroll works against that; it describes the map as being newly-discovered. But then, that part of the story is a bit mushy however one tries to interpret it; he certainly doesn’t seem to be a newcomer. Maybe he was under orders to keep it secret until The Time Was Right – in which case, what changed?
Or maybe Rey was just a random person who happened to be Force sensitive, and got caught up in the plot because of that Force sensitivity? On another planet, it might have been someone else, if that someone else had been sufficiently Force sensitive? I dunno; I really dislike the “only the Chosen Family can be Special” thing, and I don’t see any reason why, in a big universe, there can’t be others.
I think it’s less a matter of “only the chosen family can be special” and more a matter of “this has always been a family saga and that’s how it’s going to resolve”.
As I read it, that’s what it’s been from the beginning. The original (TRUE) trilogy was about Luke Skywalker. The so-called prequels (which do not exist and I wish y’all could stop believing the shared hallucination where they do) were about Anakin Skywalker. So if Episodes 7-9 wind up being about family… yes please and thank you!
This may be me reading too much into it being based on a Japanese story. I remember reading (although I forget where) that Western and Japanese storytelling styles are very different. The example given (as I remember) was for the season-ending episode of some hypothetical series. In America and places with similar storytelling tropes, the season-ending “cliffhanger” promo would probably be “One of your favorite characters will die; tune in to see which one!” while the Japanese promo would be more like “Tune in to see how Mi’i dies!”
My take: Star Wars is a family saga and has always been a family saga.
Star Wars can still be a family saga even if Rey isn’t a member of the family; Kylo is. It could be The Story of the Rise And Fall of the Skywalkers in Three Generations, emphasis on the “Fall” in the last bit, with Rey as the/an agent of that fall (helped by Luke).
I think Rey is a member of the “family.” How she is a member of the family has yet to be established, and may be a twist that surprises us all. I keep remembering the way the original Star Wards set up pretty some solid expectations about the relationships between the three main characters and even future events . . . and then the next two movies proceeded to reverse them, without contradicting anything that had gone before. (I mean, c’mon: just for example, in 1977 did anyone believe that Luke and Leia were going to end up anything but a romantic couple?)
We’ve got more information about the way the narrative works now than we did with only one movie out–but the idea that the first movie of the trilogy could be both (almost, in this case, given the ending) a standalone AND a set-up for reversal is still possible.
I must admit to being proud of myself for one thing, regarding the last scene. As the camera was panning on on the island, and I saw all that green, I said to myself: “Huh. I guess Luke Skywalker has been in exile in Ireland.” I’ve never been to Ireland, and I had no idea where the movie was filmed, but I swear that that’s what I thought.
Soon Lee: I hope we get some sort of explanation for the child neglect Rey suffered. The parenting in the Star Wars universe leaves a lot to be desired.
You and Wesley Chu are thinking on the same wavelength.
The lack of sexual edge between Rey and Kylo in the captivity scene seems like metafictional evidence of a family relationship between them. The alternative is to believe Hollywood is just getting better about that sort of thing. I can accept sun-draining weapons so big they have their own climate, but not that.
My personal theory is that Rey is Han Solo’s daughter, i.e. Kylo’s half sister. Han doesn’t seem like the faithful type.
Another option is that Rey is plotted as Kylo’s love interest, and that his love for her will be his path to redemption.
Yet another option (not incompatible with the previous one) is that Rey is the new Anakin – i.e. she is the Midichlorians’ new attempt at bringing balance to the force. Like Anakin, she is the result of immaculate conception and doesn’t have a father. Main argument against: George Lucas didn’t make this film, and most people seem to agree that the concept of Midichlorian was silly, so it’s unlikely that the new writers would base the trilogy on that.
@Tasha
Hey we’ve found something we agree on. If you talk specifics that day is bound to come. Who knows maybe we like some of the same books
That was never in doubt at this end of the wire. 😉
The character development for Rey wandered too close to Mary Sue territory for my tastes.
Like Anakin who was an immaculate birth due to the force, or Luke Skywalker who knew how to pilot an X-Wing and use the force in order to pilot and destroy the Death Star despite having only shot womprats and not believing the Force existed shortly before.
Those Mary Sues really ruined all of the movies before now!
Does Mary Sue-ness exist on a continuum? I suggested that the character wandered in that direction. But let’s see.
Anakin’s immaculate birth was due to the Force. It’s a Star Wars movie. Either the viewer can suspend disbelief enough to accept that the Force exists or they just aren’t going to buy into the premise of the fictional world. Suspension of disbelief isn’t Mary Sue, IMHO.
Luke actually has some character development that suggests some non-Mary Sue-ness.
He starts out as a farm hand repairing equipment for his uncle. He can shoot a blaster. His ability with the Force requires training/development. Even with training he gets his ass handed to him in the second movie! He claims that he’s a ‘fair pilot’, but Han verbally slaps him down by pointing out what he doesn’t know about interstellar travel. The plot involves keeping him out of physical combat because he is smaller than the average storm trooper by a non-trivial amount.
Rey is a slave in a salvage operation. We only see her reclaiming parts. If she possessed more valuable skills at repairing things (as we saw with Anakin), then her later efforts at repair would seem plausible. She takes on multiple assailants and beats them in hand-to-hand combat despite being well under their weight class. Rey beats Darth Emo despite having just an experience of touching a light saber, and having zero training. Just being told that the Force exists isn’t enough based on what we have seen in prior movies.
I suppose if JJ Abrams could have taken his eye off of special effects and blowing things up long enough to engage in some actual character development, then Rey might be a more believable character. IMHO, we have to suspend disbelief far too often and that takes the character close to the Mary Sue zone.
FWIW, my longer take is out there.
Regards,
Dann
Dann665
Rey is a slave in a salvage operation. We only see her reclaiming parts
Just to back up Jim.
The convo between Rey and Han about the modulator(or whatever) they both saw as a wast of time, shows she has engineering skills not just scavaging skills. It also backs up why she didn’t want to take the Falcon in the first place. She saw it as junk—not from its look, but because she had been through it and had pretty intimate knowledge of its workings.
Then there is the shot of her marking days. I took those as to represent her current scavenger lifestyle. At max there is three years worth of marks, so what was she doing before becoming a scavanger?
We see her use of the Force early on, without realising it. Looking back to when she first ‘rescues’ BB8 it is obvious, given what we learn, she was using mind manipulation without realising it.
And by the way, there is no indication she is a slave as you label her in the film. We know she is hanging around Jakku not because she is someone’s property, but because she is waiting for someone. This is explicitly stated in her mind battle with Kylo.
@Tintinaus
That’s part of my point. If she had more value to the salvage operation as a repair/maintenance person, then she wouldn’t be out scavenging parts. We would then have some scenes on the planet where she was doing some sort of maintenance that would justify the later conversation with Han.
Heck an info dump on how bad a condition the Falcon is in would certainly help support your position. But just saying it is junk could have come from any number of sources beyond her personal experience.
IMHO, the character development for Rey involves a whole lot of hand-waving and assumptions about things that are never even hinted at on-screen.
As for her being a slave, perhaps I’m inferring something. Yes, I know she said she was waiting for her family/someone to return to get her. It isn’t exactly a stretch for someone that is being held in some way to excuse or justify their situation by coming up with a plausible explanation for not leaving/escaping on their own.
If she were free, then she would be negotiating while selling the parts she has found. She’d be working for money instead of food. Money would pay for an education (such as engineering/maintenance) or for a way off of the planet. The settlement seems large enough to have more than one place to sell scavenged parts.
I look at the time spent developing Luke’s character early in the first movie find there to be much more ground work done for that character than was done for Rey. The whole set-up gave me the impression of “let’s do as little work with the story as possible so we can get onto the special fx and blowing stuff up.”
Regards,
Dann
Dann665: As for her being a slave, perhaps I’m inferring something. Yes, I know she said she was waiting for her family/someone to return to get her. It isn’t exactly a stretch for someone that is being held in some way to excuse or justify their situation by coming up with a plausible explanation for not leaving/escaping on their own.
I do think that has to be inferring on your part, because I didn’t get that at all from Rey’s relationship with Unkar Plutt, or her scavenging. She’s got an awful lot of freedom of motion and choice for a slave. If she’s the victim of some sort of Stockholm Syndrome, why does she want to go back when everything has gone Boom! and she’s essentially free? I read it more as being kind of an “I sold my soul to the company store” sort of situation, at most: she has to sell to Plutt because he’s the best game in town for her, if not the only one. He takes whatever advantage he can because he knows if she doesn’t sell to him, he can make life more difficult for her (which is likely the relationship he has with most of his customers, or at least rings true for me, for this kind of “small businessman in a really backwater settlement”). Thus, her options are limited, but not non-existent; she chooses. And is anyone else in that settlement working for money, that we can see? I can’t, or not that I remember. Besides, who is to say that being a scavenger doesn’t pay better than any other kind of work she could get? It’s skilled labor, it takes ability and education to figure out what’s worth scavenging and get it back to the settlement, it’s potentially hazardous so a lot of people wouldn’t be willing to do it, etc. etc. (Actually, I saw her in-atmosphere piloting of the Falcon especially as being set up a lot more effectively than Luke’s being an ace tie-fighter pilot in ANH: we see that she’s actually been inside the ship she flies the Falcon into, don’t we? And she’s clearly got some piloting skills, from the bike she rides, and understanding of the way interstellar craft’s work–as a scavenger, she’d have to.)
I’m also not really with you on the “time spent developing Luke’s character” in the first movie, really: we get snips of him interacting with his aunt and uncle and the droids and Kenobi–we get Rey’s solitary nature, her waiting, her actually taking care of herself as opposed to doing what she’s told, and, yes, her interacting with a droid and then with Finn. I didn’t have any problem with her being able to fight: honestly, she’s clearly being presented as the equivalent of a street brat, living on her own for who knows how long. If she couldn’t fight, she would be dead or enslaved, I’d say–it’s a different character trope from the Naive and Relatively Sheltered Farm Boy, but not less valid. No, we don’t get the bits of training Luke got from Kenobi on the Falcon, but that’s about it–and I get the sense of her personality, her control, very strongly in her opening sequences. You don’t, and that’s fine.
I guess the only thing I’d ask a friend of mine who saw Rey as an impossibly competent character (which isn’t exactly a Mary Sue, but okay) is this: Would you have reacted the same way if she’d been male? If you can close your eyes, play that mind-game, and honestly answer “yes,” then my response would be: “Huh. Well, sorry the character didn’t work for you. She did for me.”
@Mary
The straight-forward answer is yes. A male character with a similar lack of character development would also not work for me.
The supplemental response is that while I understand where that question comes from, I still am bothered by the implication given that nothing that I’ve introduced here has anything to do with her gender.
The supplemental, supplemental answer is that I did enjoy the movie. I didn’t think it was the worst of the seven films. I didn’t think it was the best. There were some other elements that also undermined my experience.
The link to my further thoughts got lost in the translation, FWIW.
Regards,
Dann
dann665: The supplemental response is that while I understand where that question comes from, I still am bothered by the implication given that nothing that I’ve introduced here has anything to do with her gender.
The implication meaning . . . I was accusing you of being sexist? That was definitely not my intention. (Rereads my original comment.) Oops–that second sentence containing “you” definitely does read as if it is directed specifically at you, dann665, and not at a “generic you, a friend of mine.” Sorry about that; I should be more careful with my pronouns
That said, what prompted that final paragraph, and caused me to think of the question contained in it, was your initial use of the term “Mary Sue”–which, frankly, can have sexist overtones, and therefore is why I would ask the question of anyone who used it to refer to a specific female character. If all you had said was “I found Rey as a person to be inexplicably competent and not fully developed as a character” (or even said first what you said later: “IMHO, the character development for Rey involves a whole lot of hand-waving and assumptions about things that are never even hinted at on-screen”), rather than “The character development for Rey wandered too close to Mary Sue territory for my tastes,” my first two paragraphs would likely have stood–different responses, valid difference of opinion and all–but the last would have been irrelevant to the current discussion and I likely would not have written it.
Mary Sue is kind of charged term for a female protagonist, especially when it’s used to refer to one who can’t possibly be an author-insertion character, like Rey. I find it kind of sloppy at the best of times, and yes, sometimes sexist. That you didn’t mean it that way is good to know, and I accept your response unconditionally. Fair enough?
@Mary
Absolutely fair enough!
B/R
Dann
The thing about the fight with Kylo Ren is that yes, Rey does pretty well – but against someone who shortly before was shot in the gut by an exceptionally powerful blaster-type weapon, and isn’t trying to hurt her. If Darth Vader had been shot in the gut right before Luke’s fight with him in Cloud City then Luke might have done pretty well there, too. 🙂
@Meridith
I agree that Luke probably would have done better against Darth Vader if DV had been seriously injured beforehand. He had been aware of the force, developing his understanding of the force, and training under other Jedi for quite some time already.
In contrast, Rey gets told that the force exists, has some sort of mystical awakening, and suddenly she’s good enough to take on Kylo Ren. If that was the only oddity in the movie, I could get past it. It is all of the other issues stacked in with her inexplicable victory over Kylo Ren that causes me to question the development of her character within the plot presented within the movie.
I know our focus here has been on Rey. That character wasn’t my only criticism of the movie. And I did largely enjoy the experience.
Regards,
Dann
@Dann
Meredith. 🙂 Two e’s, one i.
I think the Mary Sue matter may be clarified by the question: If Rey’s character were a boy, would what Rey does and how Rey reacts be seen as perfectly natural?
It’s established that Rey is a good stick fighter; could someone who’s more capable of analyzing fight scenes than I tell us if she’s using stickfighting moves? Because that’s another reason she might be holding her own: if she’s using an unfamiliar technique against him.
@Meredith
Dang. You’d think that a guy with an unusually spelled….and frequently misspelled…name would be better about such things. Thanks for pointing out the error.
@PiMMN
I thought about that long before I wrote anything about the movie. As a result, I believe my observations are oriented on a collection of specific behaviors that would be problematic if collected in any character regardless of gender.
Regards,
Dann
Speaking of under-written aspects of this movie, aside from being told that Kylo Reddit is tempted by the light side of the Force, are we ever shown him meaningfully struggling against said temptation? Please have something more than “He kinda didn’t wanna kill his dad a little.”
I went off on a minor rant on this on my blog, but — Rey’s a fangirl. She has a toy X-Wing pilot in her hovel, despite having no budget for luxuries. She knows who Luke Skywalker is and she’s heard his stories, so she already has some knowledge about what the Force can do. Luke and Anakin both learn about the Force moments before starting on their Jedi paths.
One might ask why Rey spent so many years in desperate poverty without even experimenting with her awesome Force powers. That’s a much more difficult question to answer. Uh … low self esteem?
If a fifties kid found a three-wish-ring, they’d probably make entirely different wishes than some contemporary kid who has seen a lot of movies.
One might ask why Rey spent so many years in desperate poverty without even experimenting with her awesome Force powers. That’s a much more difficult question to answer. Uh … low self esteem?
The day to day grind absorbing most of her headspace and spoons, maybe? A long day scavenging to not even get a day’s ration of food isn’t going to put you in a good place to learn stuff.
Charon D.: One might ask why Rey spent so many years in desperate poverty without even experimenting with her awesome Force powers. That’s a much more difficult question to answer. Uh … low self esteem?
What makes you think that she has any awareness that she’s not just like everyone else? Why would she try to experiment with something if she doesn’t even know she has it?
I could imagine ways that could work — someone with moral qualms who deals with them by committing to their wrongs even harder — but it felt more like a cheap inversion of being tempted by the dark side here.
EDIT: (Actually, Finn’s story is pretty much being tempted by the Light Side, and giving in to it.)
Max Gladstone has a blog post where he runs through the movie as a Star Wars RPG campaign, and how it would be supported by the game mechanics
http://www.maxgladstone.com/2016/01/the-force-awakens-rpg-madness/
including a discussion of Rey’s progression
and on Reddit’s temptation, there were a couple of quotes on imdb
and Snoke can tell that he is tempted
Surprised by the suggestion that Ren was a slave. Thought it was fairly clear that she was staying there by choice, waiting for someone to arrive/return. If she was a slave, why would whatshisface be buying BB8 from her? Property has no property.
oh, and I agree with JJ – I don’t see any reason to think Rey knew she had Jedi powers before the lightsabre scene at least. Maybe she had powers she was using unconsciously.
James Moar on January 26, 2016 at 4:10 am said:
As Emo Kylo Ren (@KyloR3n) said on Twitter:
“If we don’t resist the call of the light we’re no better than moths.”
@Ray: Thanks for the passages about Kylo being tempted by the Light. But they don’t count. They’re claims. Telling rather than showing. What does it even mean to be “tempted by the Light?” What does it cause Kylo to do that he wouldn’t otherwise, or pass up doing that he would’ve? What’s an actual incident where we see this temptation in action?
@Jim: “What does it even mean to be “tempted by the Light?””
There was a neat bit in… I think it was the Shadows of the Empire novel about that. It’s one of those scenes that really only works in books, though. Vader was using his Force abilities to patch up his lungs, to the point where he was able to take one free, unencumbered, unassisted breath… which brought him such relief and pleasure that it demolished his intense focus on the Dark Side disciplines that enabled it, and he’d have to start all over again.
@Jim
I don’t there was much time to show that in the movie, especially since Ren is going to perform allegiance to the Dark Side in public, but it can be read into some of his interaction with Rey, for example. And his motivation for going to the dark side in the first place seems weak. He’s running away from other things, rather than seeking power as a goal in itself, so you can see the temptation of returning. Killing his father is a way for him to commit himself, to remove the possibility of being accepted back.