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I hate to approach this from an ideological standpoint, but I think the sorts of people writing this can only tell one sort of story. They are always the poor downtrodden, oppressed rebels and the opponent is the Evil Empire, no matter how much power they have.
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On April 26 2018 07:10 Jerubaal wrote:
I hate to approach this from an ideological standpoint, but I think the sorts of people writing this can only tell one sort of story. They are always the poor downtrodden, oppressed rebels and the opponent is the Evil Empire, no matter how much power they have.
To give George Lucas some credit, the overarching political and military feel of the prequels was one where the Separatist Confederation and Republic were somewhat evenly matched. The Republic even had an edge over the Separatists as the war went on. Very different dynamic than the original trilogy, and to me, the political stuff was the most interesting thing about the prequel trilogy. It wasn't as black-and-white as the original trilogy in terms of who was good and who was bad.
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After listening to your rants, I just wanna say a few things:
100% agree with everything you said about how this thing was built and how it can fire a beam that precise across the galaxy and be seen from the ground on a planet in another star system and be built by a fringe faction.
But believe it or not, that's not what pissed me off most about Starkiller Base. No no no no, I have my own stuff to add to the pile of complaints about Starkiller Base.
#1, it's actually not important at all - Despite the SKB being the thing that causes Finn's character arc, and for Han to be killed, and for Rey and Finn to fight Kylo Ren, and the thing that destroys the whole Republic (Because I guess the Republic put all their eggs in one basket by having their government and fleet all in one system) the SKB is not important at all. In Episode 8, it's not even mentioned. I know some people could make the argument that the Death Star isn't mentioned in The Empire Strikes Back, but that movie takes place 4 years after the events of the original Star Wars. TLJ takes place immediately after TFA. Snoke doesn't even seem to mind that it's gone. The reason Snoke gets mad at Hux is because the Resistance cruiser got away, despite the fact that Snoke's ship can track them through hyperspace. So maybe Snoke is so stupid that he doesn't know about his own ship's capabilities, or maybe he just wanted to force-toss Hux around for no reason.
Next, the Starkiller Base is introduced wayyyy too late in the movie. The Death Star was an integral part of the original movie. Everything in the movie has to do with how awful this weapon is, and how it has to be stopped. That's what makes the final sequence in A New Hope memorable, because this huge evil machine has been defeated. From the start of the movie to the end, defeating the Death Star is the focus of the movie. In TFA, the Starkiller Base just kind of pops out of from behind a curtain and goes "Oh, by the way, I'm in this movie." and it felt like someone said to JJ, "Hey great script, but uh, can we have a superweapon in this movie?" and JJ goes, "Oh. Sure. No problem.", then he grabs the script, pulls out a pencil, and starts scribbling something. Moments later, he looks up and says "Alright, there we go."
#2, the SKB isn't important at all, but the movie tells us it's super-important, but the movie is lying. I was fully onboard with a superweapon being in the new Star Wars. I knew it was going to happen. But like this? It's introduced late in the movie. The movie is 2 hours long, and guess when the SKB is first mentioned? 1 hour and 30 minutes into the movie. With the original movie, the Death Star is mentioned by name in the title crawl. The title crawl of TFA focuses entirely on the map to Luke Skywalker, and a majority of the movie focuses on the map as well. Approximately, 20 minutes after the SKB is brought up in a cringey exposition scene, the Resistance attacks the SKB, and blows it up. They even fly through a trench for a bit, and the X-Wing pilots exchange some banter, like "I'm hit!". They kill the weapon with absolute ease and then fly away. It doesn't capture the magic of the original movie's final battle at all. AT ALL.
#3, why is it so easy to blow up superweapons? In the original Star Wars film, the original Death Star was constructed to hold off an all-out attack by a fleet of capital ships. It had large gun turrets for taking out cruisers for anyone who might try to defect and use a fleet to attack the Death Star. The reason the original Death Star was destroyed in the first place was because the Empire overlooked a potential weakness in their weapon. In other words, they didn't know it could be destroyed so easily. They didn't think anyone could hit the reactor core in the middle of the station, because it was completely encapsulated. In Return of The Jedi, the new Death Star has a weakness, but it has this weakness in order to lure the Rebel fleet into a big battle. The Emperor leaked the information to the Rebels deliberately so that they would attack, AND he deliberately made sure the new Death Star was only partially-finished so that it would appear to be vulnerable. Unfortunately, he didn't count on Ewoks ruining his plan.
If the shield generator on Endor hadn't been destroyed, the only fireworks at the end of Return of The Jedi would be the Rebel fleet being eviscerated. Even still, ships had to actually fly into the Death Star to get to the reactor core, because the Empire wanted to make damn sure a single fighter couldn't blow the whole thing up from outside of the space station. You'd think the First Order would recognize this, and make sure their superweapon was safe from one-man starfighters blowing the whole fucking thing up, but they didn't. Why? My educated guess was because JJ Abrams wanted the Resistance to blow up a superweapon at the end of the movie to make it like A New Hope. It's so bad though, because that wasn't even the point of the friggin' movie, and blowing it up should've been saved for the very last movie.
Actually, if JJ didn't blow it up in his story, I'm sure Rian Johnson would do something like have it blow up for no reason.
In Episode 1, the droid control ship gets blowed up to parallel the story with A New Hope. I get that. But again, the Trade Federation is established very early on as being an overwhelming military power compared to Naboo because of their massive military force. The stakes in episode 1 are still high, despite the droid control ship not being a superweapon. Still, destroying the droid control ship is comically easy because the Trade Federation made the ghastly error of putting an unshielded main reactor in their hangar bay. And then somehow, that causes the big ball in the middle to somehow blow up. I'm not sure why that would ever happen, but I digress.
#4 How did anyone get off of SKB before it explodeded? When the first Death Star blew up, it took Governor Tarkin with it. There was even a scene where an officer approached Tarkin and requested that Tarkin get off the Death Star, just in case. Tarkin said "No." and got all blowed up. So how did Kylo Ren get off the planet? How did Hux get off the planet? When the weapon was fired, a lot of First Order troops were shown standing in formation while Hux screamed at them like Hitler. Did they get off the planet? On top of all of this, how did Captain Phasma get off the planet? I understand Hux getting away, but Captain Phasma? Everyone thought she was dead after TFA. She got thrown into a trash compactor (with no R2 unit to stop it from smashing everything) on a planet that was going to blow up. THEN, she has the audacity to show up in TLJ like nothing happened. The nerve!
Anyway, how did Hux even know where to find Kylo Ren in order to get him off the planet? There's no way he could've known exactly where to look unless Kylo Ren carries a tracking device with him at all times. I mean, it's possible. The Star Wars universe is full of technological wonders, but it just feels weird when the movie explains everything away with either "it was the force" or "they had some kind of device". Even R2-D2 feels like cheating, because he can basically do anything. Nevertheless, despite all the marvelous technology that exists in this universe, there's no way that The First Order didn't take a huge hit from having SKB destroyed. They obviously had a lot of troops stationed there, and there is no mention of any of them escaping.
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I feel the biggest issue with the new Star Wars is that the creative staff is very good at making it look like & feel like Star Wars, but it's fairly clear the writing/story staff are just not that capable. Plus, they seem to have an instinctive hatred for either the canon or the fans, as they reliably make decisions to spite people that like their property. (Generally a bad business move, btw.) I think JJ Abrams kept them in check more during TFA, but clearly that powerful drive took over for TLJ.
Thus, they needed "a bigger Death Star" and just put it in there, then they have proxies in the media complain about how limiting the story telling opportunities are within Star Wars. (No, staff writers & publicists for Disney/LucasFilm, it's because you lack the ability to think ahead & create compelling antagonists.) They could have even used a new set of Super Weapons, but updated into a new style of "modern" combat. The previous Star Wars combat/Space Visual approach was taken from WW2 air combat, which means they could have simply updated it to a take more like modern combat with a swarm of heavy weapon platforms. Plus, rather than 1 planet-sized base, the First Order could have had, say, 4 separate Death Sabers that could hyperspeed jump into a sector, obliterate a planet, then jump out. The point of them, for the world building, was to reset the political nature of the place. Could have done that without, "we need a bigger Death Star".
Pretty much every creative decision follows along that same sort of approach: take something from the original, make it bigger, worse and then complain when people are having issues with it. The Death Star Plans, in Star Wars, was functionally the Macguffin, but the Death Star was reflective of the Nuclear Weapons Age. (In many ways operating with a similar function to Godzilla in Japanese monster movies.) Starkiller Base existed because they needed a bigger Death Star to exist, which is about as much logic as went into it.
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On April 26 2018 18:51 Taf the Ghost wrote:
Starkiller Base existed because they needed a bigger Death Star to exist, which is about as much logic as went into it.
I think it's more because whenever JJ Abrams makes a script for a movie, he immediately goes "I know! A bad guy has a superweapon!"
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It really does feel shoehorned in. The whole plot of A New Hope revolved around the Death Star Plans. Luke was almost a side plot. In TFA, a) we already have a main plot, finding Luke and b) the base does not figure into the plot at all. I don't believe Finn mentions it at all, despite apparently having worked on it.
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You guys are making good points, but this whole "glossed over" feel that SKB has is a HUGE problem that I mention in the video.
SKB is essential to the way the plot in the sequel trilogy develops. The fact that Disney is expecting us to NOT pay attention to it, is fucking insulting. I'm sorry, but it's fucking insulting. You can't have something reset the balance of military and political power in the established galaxy of Star Wars and just expect us to gloss over it. You can't.
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@ninazerg
I thoroughly enjoyed reading your rant, I agree with everything you said. Captain Phasma in particular is a comically bad character to the point where I think she's just a metajoke, she exists JUST to be a parody of Boba Fett. She's so unbelievable that I never in the first place ever gave her a a second thought.
I don't know for sure if that's what Disney intended, but that's how I see her.
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@Taf the Ghost- What makes something NOT a MacGuffin? It seems like any plot that revolves around an item is called a MacGuffin.
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On April 27 2018 04:35 Jerubaal wrote:
@Taf the Ghost- What makes something NOT a MacGuffin? It seems like any plot that revolves around an item is called a MacGuffin.
That's basically the definition of a MacGuffin. The problem most people have with MacGuffins is that it's not the actions of characters that are driving the plot, but because the good guys and the bad guys both want the thing. Usually, it has value, like a huge diamond, or gives people powers. But in TFA, the map doesn't really do anything. It plays a very non-active role in the movie. If a character has a tool that allows them to make decisions, then the storytelling goes back to being character-based.
It's not always "bad" to have a MacGuffin, but it's become such a cliche that now when writers go to it, it feels like lazy writing, and that's where this trope annoys people.
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I get that it can be a cliche or a trope, but it seems like any item that is important to the plot is called a MacGuffin. The map in TFA hardly rises to the level of a MacGuffin. The map comes up in the opening scene of TFA and then is forgotten for 45 minutes then it's solved in one scene. The other guy seemed to suggest that the Death Star plans were a MacGuffin and I think it was quite woven throughout the plot.
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On April 27 2018 09:50 Jerubaal wrote:
I get that it can be a cliche or a trope, but it seems like any item that is important to the plot is called a MacGuffin. The map in TFA hardly rises to the level of a MacGuffin. The map comes up in the opening scene of TFA and then is forgotten for 45 minutes then it's solved in one scene. The other guy seemed to suggest that the Death Star plans were a MacGuffin and I think it was quite woven throughout the plot.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacGuffin
George Lucas
On the commentary soundtrack to the 2004 DVD release of Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, writer and director George Lucas describes R2-D2 as "the main driving force of the movie … what you say in the movie business is the MacGuffin … the object of everybody's search".[13] In TV interviews, Hitchcock defined a MacGuffin as the object around which the plot revolves, but as to what that object specifically is, he declared, "The audience don't care".[14] In contrast, Lucas believes that the MacGuffin should be powerful and that "the audience should care about it almost as much as the dueling heroes and villains on screen".[15]
I was just going to link the wiki entry on it, but there is, hilariously enough, at point about Star Wars listed in it. I guess that explained my point.
MacGuffins aren't bad, it's just a tool to set off a narrative, so it's really just how they're used. It obviously works well in A New Hope, but the "echo" of it within The Force Awakens is much weaker. The new Star Wars has the look & feel of the old, but they really are just echoing the past & doing weaker versions of it. That's really what's driving so many of these discussions, as we keep finding more & more problems with the approach they took.
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EPT
