It's the NZ accent that sells the pun, though. 
[Movies] Talk about the last movie you saw 2: Electric Threadaloo
- Thread starter Dave
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CIVIL WAR!
Just...just wonderful.
Just...just wonderful.
I loved the movie, and similar to you, went in knowing nothing about it. It's connected to the first movie only in spirit, and goddamn John Goodman acted his ass off in that.
The only place the movie lost me was the very end, and you know exactly when. But at least the protagonist acknowledged this as well. "Oh, come on."
I saw it in theaters a few weeks ago, that's how I feel about it too. It's really weird. There's some really beautiful cinematography, and I suppose the movie does provoke some thought... but yeah, it's pretty weird.
Watched The Force Awakens again. On a whim, I went back to the earlier movies and watched their lightsaber duels to compare, and came to the conclusion that every lightsaber wielder in TFA would get owned so hard by the Jedi and Sith of ages past. Finn, Rey, and Darth Emo would not last more than three moves against the likes of Maul, Dooku, Sidious, Windu, Obi-Wan, and Anakin. Hell, even RotJ Luke would destroy them.
Still a good movie though.
Still a good movie though.
Well, of those three, two are completely untrained, one isn't even force sensitive, and one has had only partial training and has never been truly tested.
Just watched Fan4Stic......
I knew it was going to be bad but...... seriously.... not that bad.
It's reaaaallllllly bad.
I thought there was no way that Doom could be worse then in the last FF films..... I was horribly, horribly mistaken. The only good thing about Doom was that he made the rest of the team look good by comparison.... they were not.
If you haven't seen it...... don't.
I knew it was going to be bad but...... seriously.... not that bad.
It's reaaaallllllly bad.
I thought there was no way that Doom could be worse then in the last FF films..... I was horribly, horribly mistaken. The only good thing about Doom was that he made the rest of the team look good by comparison.... they were not.
If you haven't seen it...... don't.
Saw Zootopia. No deep insights. The plot is obvious a mile away. The moralizing is blatant.
But still, a fun little flick.
But still, a fun little flick.
I'm pretty sure they'd just have to watch Maul or one of those other prequel clowns do a bunch of flips with the blatant motive of attacking their opponents lightsaber instead of the opponent's body, and then make one attack to the middle to cut the prequel clown in half.
Yeah I know. Still though, I hope we get to see some real skill someday in the new trilogy. Maybe Luke vs Snoke or something like that.
I doubt we'd see that, but you know Rey and Kylo are both going to get some serious training for a rematch.
I can't comment on whether they really do attack each other's lightsabers, I'd have to go back and rewatch more carefully, but the main thing that stood out to me was how much faster the prequel duelists were. In the time it took for Kylo Ren to swing his lightsaber once, Anakin could've stabbed him four or five times.
But wouldn't have, because of all the cartwheels. It's easy to be faster when you're a CGI puppet without weight. If you're going to compare the prequels against anything, it should probably be the video games. If you're comparing TFA to anything, it should be the original trilogy.
I'm glad you posted this. I've always thought the duels in the original trilogy were much more interesting than the prequels, because each of them was more than just a fight. They were a conversation, a clashing of ideas and philosophies. I think TFA nails that, as the ultimate lightsaber battle shows a lot about the characters involved. It shows Finn stepping up and no longer running away, it shows Kylo's flaws as well as his strength (like beating his wound to pump himself up through pain) and also shows Rey finally realizing her power, which I know a lot of people shit on because they think she's a Mary Sue, but I'm still willing to bet her surprising ability will turn out to be a major plot point.
I don't disagree with anything he said, although I do think he's a bit harsh to say the prequel duels were boring. My point is that, from a speed and technique perspective, the prequel duelists and original trilogy duelists would win handily against the TFA duelists. (Understandably so, because TFA has two complete novices and one partially trained guy, as already pointed out)
Rey IS a Mary Sue. But Luke was a Marty Sue as well, and even if he wasn't, it fundamentally doesn't matter to the plot. And to be frank, I've seen worse Mary Sues in other films.
I think boring is the right word because these are the climaxes of their movies, but two problems are going on: 1. lack of emotional investment and 2. the lightsabers were used over and over and over throughout the movie, so there's no big deal to them coming out. If you change that stuff, maybe the ridiculous fights would gather some interest even if they are over the top silly compared to the duels in the other movies. I think you get into the style over substance stuff in movies sometimes, but the flat way the prequel duels are shot and the overdone choreography that lacks a human element doesn't grab me. Which is why the OT duels and TFA duel do; because even though they aren't visually impressive, the way they're shot puts you right in there with the characters and the story to that point has earned this level of emotional confrontation.
Then again, you can apply that to almost every scene in the prequel trilogy; lacking any emotion or investment. Revenge of the Sith probably has the most going on, but Episodes I and II are hollow beyond redemption.
I don't agree that Rey is a Mary Sue, but I think we'd have to define what we mean by that, as it's been a point of contention here and elsewhere online in the recent past.[DOUBLEPOST=1462962825,1462962684][/DOUBLEPOST]
Thank you. This is exactly the crap I'm talking about.
I think the only thing she does that I had a problem with during the entire movie was the whole "Oh yeah... I've been living out in the fucking desert as a scavenger since I was like 3 but I TOTALLY know how to pilot a starship" thing. With Luke, we had him talk about piloting ships since very early in the story ("So hey... I want to enlist in the pilot academy...") and he talks about flying his T-16 before he EVER steps foot into an X-Wing ("I used to bullseye womprats back home in my T-16...").
New powers/skills as the plot demands is the definition of a Mary Sue. I can buy her using her force powers to do just about anything because Luke was able to use his abilities without training as well, but at least Luke had an explanation for why he could fly a starship and he wasn't doing impossible dog-fighting maneuvers ether. But, again, Luke wasn't exactly better about some of the stuff he did in later movies ether, almost completely untrained.
If you want to see what sword fighting really looks like, look up some HEMA events.
These guys' moves look a lot more like the original trilogy swordplay than the over-choreographed stuff seen in the prequels. The prequel sword play reminds me of Wushu form competition: impractical and flashy. We used to call that "fancy dancing" back in my old kung fu class.
That super choreographed stuff might look impressive and pretty, but it lacks gravitas and a sense of danger. It just looks like fancy dancing.
To some people, Vader and Obi Wan kind of wobbling around and feinting at each other might look silly or like someone without skill, but to me, I see two guys who know that as soon as one of them commits to an action, someone's probably gonna die.
But there is no indication that she never piloted a ship before, either. I did some poking around, and a prequel book by Greg Rucka, "Before the Awakeing", says that she found a flight sim program as a kid and spent a lot of hours playing with that. The movie novelization also has her mention that she spent a lot of time poking around the ships in the junkyard and learning how they worked.
I assumed that she was raised by the junkyard owner--that's who she is left with--and it's quite likely he did the "Hey, kid, move that ship to the back of the lot, will ya!" since she was old enough to reach the controls, and has experience flying and repairing many different types of ships.
And that would have been a fine thing to put in the movie. It's not even that I didn't assume that was the case... but it's not in the movie. Finn's command experience isn't in the movie ether, which is why TRAITOR comes out of nowhere; he's the last surviving guy from his squad, but we don't know that because we never get a scene between Finn and the guy after their last mission together. It's in a side story too. If anything, it's the director's fault for not including such material because the movie feels pretty chopped up as it is. I shouldn't be expected to go out and buy the novelization to get an answer for why Ray can do this pretty important thing she does; it should have been in the movie and it wasn't because ether the director or Disney didn't think it was important enough to be.
If it sounds like I'm being a hard ass over this, it's probably because I went through this shit back with Ghostbusters.
"Winston's ex-military, with weapons experience and the ability to design electrical equipment. It's in every script EXCEPT the one they shot AND in the comics and video game."
"It's not in the movie."
"I have an interview with Ernie Hudson where he talks about rehearsing that script. Dan Akyrod and Harold Ramis expanded his role in the 2008 video game script and had him receive a doctorate as a way of apologizing!"
"IT'S NOT IN THE MOVIE!" *flips table*
So she's not a Mary Sue, but she certainly ended up looking like one because the people in charge of telling the story didn't care enough to explain something fairly important, except in a side material.
GasBandit
Staff member
Well, that and she hasn't got a single solitary flaw and is better at everything than everyone else. Tinkering with a simulator as a kid or no, she flies and fixes the Falcon better than Han Solo, is more athletic and combat-capable (not to mention braver) than a protagonist-grade stormtrooper, is able to use force coercion with no training whatsoever... the only thing that even comes close to an unsuccessful endeavor for her is how the saber-visions scare her enough so that, for a day or so, she doesn't want to touch it ever again.
Even Luke got shot in the ass by a practice droid every now and then.
I agree with that. I liked the movie, it turned out better than I expected, but it did have a feeling of being rushed, like they skipped over all that boring backstory stuff to get to the exciting parts. Luke got far more early character development than Rey did. Also didn't help that she was sharing character development time with two other characters (Finn and Poe). Luke had that all to himself in Star Wars, we really didn't learn much about Han and Leia until Empire and Jedi.
Maybe that's an assumption of modern filmmakers, that people will just look this stuff up online, so concentrate on the explosions?
My easy explanation is "JJ Abrams". I have my own set of biases about him, given his treatment of the Star Trek universe, and I just assume I'll need to fill in the blanks or hand-wave away the bizarre deviations from canon. (Don't get me started on Kirk "fixing" the warp drive...)
Ehhhh, I wouldn't go that far. She spent most of the first flight hitting the sand and crashing into things. The only reason they survived the dog fight was that she knew the terrain better. As far as fixing, both she and Han knew something was blocking the hyperdrive, she just found it first and ripped it out.
There's also something to be said for advanced flight systems. There may be little more to flying a ship than there is to piloting any vehicle on land or air. Compare today's 747 console to the console of the millenium falcon and you have to accept that in the Star Wars universe flying through space is easier than flying through the air is in our time.
She had to do it trial-and-error, though. When she first tried it, she was panicky and failed. Then she calmed down and tried it again. Obviously it would have been better to show a longer learning process, but the movie has limited time. It at least showed her try-fail-learn-succeed. That is why I think she was able to fight back against Kylo Ren though she is untrained, she figured out the Force works for her when she is calm and focused, while he throws temper tantrums and is unfocused.
I did think it was kind of weird that Ren's near-psychotic anger towards the end of the movie didn't seem to make him much more powerful. That's the kind of shit Dark Side power thrives on.
I think that's actually really well depicted throughout all the series. Anger has only led to mistakes. Compare anakin's duel with obi-wan. The more passionate he got about how right he was and how wrong his mentor was, the more mistakes he made. His anger at the sand people for his mother's death led him to kill them - this too was a mistake.
His shear power was what kept him alive through these mistakes, but I don't think the passion of anger helped him. Consider Count Dooku's escape from Yoda - he didn't show anger, he did what he needed to do, force Yoda into the position where Yoda had to let him go to save others, and walked away. Palpatine was never angry - he was always in control of his feelings, just as a true jedi master should be.
This movie really forces the issue to the front. We don't actually know the power level of Rey or Ren, but it's blatantly obvious that Ren uses his power as an outlet for his emotional turmoil, while Rey uses her power almost from meditation and single minded focus.
If anything, your emotions make you manipulable and susceptible to being preyed on by other dark side users. This is why anakin never would have taken the throne from palpatine, nor really desired to, and couldn't have shown forth his power against palpatine until he had something worth fighting for that wasn't drawn from his sense of anger.
Wouldn't the anger need to be focused, though? Anakin was pretty single-minded and focused with his anger (revolving around his mother, and the anger at the Jedi for preventing him from protecting her) in the prequels. Ren just seems all over the place, like a stereotypical emo teenager who's angry at everything and blindly lashes out. I don't get why he is the way he is. How can you grow up to be that sullen and angry when you have Chewbacca for an uncle? That's like Best. Family. Ever!