Thoughts on Star Wars: TFA

My brother watched TFA on opening night, and the rest of us just watched it Friday night.  While planning for the tickets with my dad, we texted him to find out if he wanted to join us; I asked him coyly if he thought it was worth watching a second time.  He responded "I dunno.  I'll have to watch it again to be sure."  We laughed at the time, but afterwards both of us remarked that that was a surprisingly apt statement.

I have extremely mixed feelings about the film.  On the one hand, all of my issues with the prequels were more or less addressed: the CGI, while still obvious at times, was much more seamless.  There was no dialogue that made me actively cringe.  It didn't retroactively ruin the original trilogy.  On the other....well.

The action was intense. The single shot of Pou (sp?) kicking TIE pilot's trash in around the battlefield was fantastic.  There were tons of moments that I loved: Han getting in over his head and proving why being a famous smuggler is a contradiction of terms.  The engine stall of the Millennium Falcon to line up the shot just right.  Force-freezing the blaster bolt in mid-air.

But for every great moment there was one that gave me pause.  Why do we have three factions, and why is there a "Resistance" that is resisting a non-government body?  Isn't that usually called, like, "The Military"?  Why does the old Imperial database have most of Luke's map but somehow the official government's only copy resides in an R2 unit?

Most of my uneasiness is hard to pin down.  I don't know /why/ I don't absolutely love it for the most part, but I'm sure I'll figure it out at some point.  There is one factor that is obvious, however: a sort of love-hate relationship with adding newness to the series.

I mean, at times the film reads like bad fanfiction.  A completely dead desert planet inhabited by gangsters and slaves--but it's totally not Tatooine!  A bar populated with scum and villainy--but not the Cantina!  An enormous planet-destroying superweapon--but totally Not The Death Star!  The Sith are all dead--but not the Knights of Ren! It's like they weren't allowed to make new stuff, but at the same time they weren't allowed to use the old stuff, and so they had to make up an uninspired blend of new-old stuff.  Welcome To The New Desert Planet--Same As The Old Desert Planet.

What makes it more frustrating is that all of these old-new places are objectively /better/ than the old ones.  Slaves that aren't owned part and parcel--the individuals involved are just trapped into working insane conditions for miserly portions, much more relatable to modern audiences than deed ownership.  The bar isn't just a bar in some scumbag town--it's an /oasis/, a safe-house, that attracts equal parts down-on-their-luck's and n'er-do-well's.  The planet-sized weapon was /built into an existing planet/...I had never thought of it, but this is /significantly/ more reasonable to do than welding continent-sized bits of metal plates together.  Focusing the sun's energy for power is great too...this is a literal Star Destroyer.

So why were they stuck with both feet in the past?  I can't even say they had one foot in the old and one foot in the new, it's more like a 75/25 split.  I /get/ the need for nostalgia, but this reminds me increasingly of Superman Returns: let's take the old film, redo it with fancy graphics, and hope this works as a starting point for a new generation!  Let's see: a droid with secret plans escaped a battle to be found by a desert nobody who has to now run away from everything they know on the Millennium Falcon while struggling with something they barely understand called the Force while being hunted by a robo-guy in a black mask, eventually ending up on an impossibly large planet-destroying battle station which they later destroy.  Wait, isn't this a little familiar?

Of course not, the droid's /ROUND/.  We've never had a ROUND droid before!

While I can appreciate the lack of painful dialogue, the new dialogue direction has a certain.../levity/ to it.  There was humor in the OT, but it wasn't /comedy/.  They were lighthearted moments, but seldom laugh-out-loud.  The new jokes etc have a way of breaking the sort of serious thread that always seemed to hold in Star Wars films--even in the prequels, droid and gungan antics notwithstanding.

I also can't quite get over how /convenient/ some things were.  Han finding the Falcon...okay, that's about par for the course, and he /was/ looking for it, so that gets a pass.  On the other hand, having Luke's/Anakin's original lightsabre, which I'm pretty sure fell off of Bespin onto a gas giant, feels far too coincidental.  R2 waking up for the finale?  Typical. And don't give me that "he detected the lightsabre", this was the /original/, i.e. not the one he held in his chassis in RotJ.  Pou made it off of Jakku and beat the protaganists?  Of course, how could he /not/ make it off the barren desert world with no contacts with a New Order contingent in orbit?   The badass super-stormtrooper lady just gives up and /turns off the shield/?  Guess that armor's not good for anything.  Oh, and neither is the indoctrination training, if you can't even convince your loyal officers to maybe take one for the team and /not/ betray everyone.

There's also some issues with plot holes and inconsistencies--Finn knows Han as "the great war-hero"...but he was raised as a New Order indoctrinee.  Who writes their textbooks?  Leia mentions that she should have sent Kylo Ren to Luke to train, but then we're told that's exactly what lead to this whole mess in the first place.

I've also got a bit of a beef with how drawn-out some scenes became.  As soon as Han stepped on that walkway he was a goner, but we had to sit through an incredibly fake-feeling will-he-won't-he back-and-forth first.  Rey meeting Luke felt very much like not enough butter spread over too much bread--the musical queues weren't lined up properly, with the music swelling as the camera stayed locked on her face, before switching to his, and then /finally/ to the wide-angle shot the swelling seemed to be ushering in, like, 10 seconds off cue.  Other scenes felt stretched a bit, but not to the breaking point like these two were.

Tangentially, and completely surprising to me, even the /music/ felt mediocre.  I mean, this is John-frakking-Williams!  And yet...the only themes I could pick out were themes I was already familiar with.  As far as I could tell, there was no new musical oomph for the new guys--no Dual of the Fates or Droid Invasion or even Anakin's/Padme's theme.  Heck, they should have gotten the guy who did the trailer music--I was never so disappointed as when I found out that I wouldn't be hearing that incredible blend of old orchestrals and new synth.

All-in-all, I love many of the /pieces/, just not how they all fit together.  All the elements were there for a fantastic Star Wars film, but something was lost in the baking process.  As I told my brother after the fact, too much dessert and not quite enough main course.