Reflections on Star Wars VII Part 1

As you may have seen in our review blogs I was lucky enough to go and see Star Wars the Force Awakens the other day. In my review I was very much spoiler free or at least I hope I was but in this post there WILL BE SPOILERS

 

 

OK for those that are still reading YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED, ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE FOR HERE THERE BE SPOILERS!!!!

Anyway as I said in my review, my wife and I both thought that it was a great movie…if it was anything but a Star Wars movie. As a Star Wars movie this is truly subpar compared to the originals (I won’t even bother comparing it to the prequels because there is such an unnatural hatred of those 3 that is truly unfair and unjustified in my eyes). So anyways being a HUGE fan of the Star Wars Expanded Universe I went into this movie very conflicted about it and unfortunately, I came out the same way and so I am going to put some of my questions and observations here.

My first big thing that I mentioned briefly in my review is that in the case of this movie I find a huge failing in the fact that by the end of the movie you really don’t know much about the main characters. In the original Star Wars you had a pretty good idea who everyone was that were the main players by the end of the first movie. We all knew who Han was and what he was like, he was easy to describe and it was the same with Luke and Leia and even the two droids C3PO and R2-D2. In fact the only one I would say was at all mysterious at the end of the first movie would have been Chewie, and that’s just because no one knows what the hell he’s saying! In this movie things aren’t nearly so cut and dried.  For instance:

• Finn- Stormtrooper- Worked in janitorial and somehow got assigned to a combat mission, wusses out on first combat mission and runs away and suddenly goes all moral. Was brainwashed since he was a kid to be a loyal stormtrooper.
• Rey- Lives on a desert planet waiting for her family, is a scavenger that seems to be able to speak just about any language, seems to be a prodigy at using the force. Has some sort of tie to Skywalker but we have to wait till another movie to find out what.
• Admiral Hux- He’s the grand moff Tarkin of this movie, seems to be at odds with Kylo Ren, very much an Adolf Hitler type of character
• Kylo Ren- we know the most about this character in that he is Han and Leia’s kid, he somehow gets tainted by Supreme Leader Snoke and falls to the dark side, he took out Luke’s jedi school on his own just like his grandad did, he worships what Vader did in the dark side and wants to continue it. Kills his dad but doesn’t seem to care. For a force user is very bad at fighting. He has one hell of a temper problem and throws tantrums that even Stormtroopers back away from.

 

So now we have some big reveals in the movie that bring on more questions than others especially when you know anything about the EU and some of the questions even pop up if you know nothing of the EU.

Finn was taken as a child and doesn’t even know his name just a call number. He was indoctrinated since an infant to serve the first order as a stormtrooper he is one of the best of the best as he wears the white armor of a trooper and is sent on a mission where he is supposed to kill a full village of people along with his fellow troops. Until this time Fin has followed every order 100% loyally and has never deviated from his programing. Somehow this is his first mission and he just completely wusses out and helps a rebel snub-fighter pilot escape. Later in the movie almost at the end he reveals that he was a sanitation worker… Ummmm WHAT? Is the First Order so understaffed that they will send Janitors on kill missions? Why did they train a Janitor from birth basically to be a Stormtrooper? Was he just such a bad Stormtrooper that he was made a janitor and if so how did he end up on this mission if he was such a fuck up? You can certainly tell that Finn doesn’t know much as he asks Poe if he can fly a Tie-Fighter and then reveals he wants Poe to fly them out of the system, maybe because he is a stormtrooper and not a tie-pilot he wouldn’t know that Tie-Fighters don’t have hyperdrives but I would think even troopers would have some rudimentary knowledge of such a major ship in the First Orders fleet. Another great question is how does a person who has been brainwashed since infancy suddenly develop a conscience and sense of morals in just one skirmish. I mean honestly 20 some years of brainwashing doesn’t just get erased by a bloody handprint on a visor.

Rey is left abandoned on the desert world of Jakku as a kid and told to wait there. Who left her there and why? We get during the movie when she sees Luke’s saber that she has some sort of tie to him but the question is how? In the EU Han and Leia had 3 kids, Anakin and then the twins Jacen and Jaina. At first I thought they were doing a new version of the latest SW:EU Storyline which had Jacen going to the dark side and Jaina hunting him down however we find that Kylo isn’t Jacen and Leia and Han don’t ever mention having any other kids and never mention having a girl at all. In fact it seems by the way they talk that they have only ever had the one kid. So then how is Rey linked to Luke? Did he end up with someone and have a daughter? If so why the hell did he abandon her? Why not take her into hiding with him? Who is the mother and what happened to her? If she is Luke’s daughter why does Leia or Han not say something. If she is linked to Luke then why does she think he is a myth even though she is waiting for her family which if it is Luke she would know right? Also how does Rey become so good at the force so fast? Here is a girl who thinks the force is a myth and then she has 1 HUGE force vision, has no clue what it is and runs the hell away. I can’t blame her on doing that personally. Then she is captured and for some reason says to the lone guard (why only one guard anyway and why in the same room?) “You will release me and leave leaving the door open” or something to that effect. The guard yells at her but for some reason this gives her a glimmer of hope that she could do this and wham she says it again and he does exactly that and then drops his blaster for her! She didn’t even need to use the hand gestures that usually come with a force mind trick! Even Obi-Wan had to do the hand wave thingie to influence someone’s mind and that was after becoming a master, she just says it and it’s like “OK no prob!” Not only is this girl a wiz when it comes to the force but she is a wiz when it comes to flying the Falcon. Having never flown in it before (that she knows of) she runs into it and starts it up and flies it very skillfully, almost as skillfully if not more so than Han himself can. Then later in the movie she’s talking about bypassing this that and the other saying that she told the guy who had owned it before she stole it from him that he was doing something that put too much strain on the hyperdrive. Well how would she know this if she had not been in it while it was flying for that guy at least. Maybe I had misheard something but that was certainly the way it sounded.

Kylo Ren is this movies Darth Vader. It’s been said in the movie that he has powers of the force and is still torn between dark and light even though he destroyed Luke’s new Jedi Order…sounds pretty damned dark side to me! Supposedly Kylo Ren has not yet finished his training maybe that’s why he does not yet have the Darth appelage at the beginning of his name? Then they have the HUGE reveal Kylo Ren is Han and Leia’s son BEN! Ben? Really? Why Ben? Being a fan of the EU when I hear a jedi named ben I think of Skywalkers Son. So here we have Disney throwing in the EU and using it in a way that makes no sense at all. Why would Leia and Han call their son Ben? In the EU Luke called his son Ben after his old teacher Obi-Wan Kenobi. Han and Leia didn’t know Ben Kenobi they knew Obi-Wan. Did they let Luke name their son for them? Also for a guy who destroyed Luke’s new Jedi Order he is horrible at fighting. An untrained Finn who has no force sensitivity that we can see was beating him in a lightsaber duel during most of it. The same Finn that was losing to the taser wielding stormtrooper earlier in the movie…you know the janitor…he was beating the leader of the Knights of Ren in a lightsaber battle! Also for a kid so strong in the force you really don’t see him use it all that much. In previous films the dark side force users did so many things to win duels like using force pull and push powers, force lightning and all sorts of underhanded tricks yet with Kylo the only time you really get an overt display of his power is when he is interrogating a prisoner, and the one time he stopped the blaster bolt or made a person stop, otherwise he just hacks and slashes with a lightsaber in such a way he seems untrained in it’s use.

So then we get to the typical JJ Abrams trick death scene. In Star Trek into darkness they had what was essentially a new version of Wrath of Khan and as an homage to the original had a nice little death scene where Spock dies…oh wait sorry yeah JJ went and changed that so that Kirk dies instead of Spock… So now we get to the major death scene in this movie and we see Han get cut down by his own son as Chewie roars in anger seeing his lifelong friend fall into the abyss below after his son skewers him. In the EU during the beginning of the Yuuzhan Vong invasion you see Chewie die trying to save Hans son Anakin from certain death. In this we see Han die as he tries to save his son from certain dark sidedness, doesn’t pack quite the same punch if you ask me.

 

TO BE CONTINUE IN NEXT BLOG……https://draxisweb.com/dwp/?p=2394

 

Photo’s courtesy of:

Finn- theguardian.com

Rey- hitfix.com

Kylo- comicvine.com

Han death- youtube.com