All hope for a better movie than the first "sequel" died the moment I saw the lineup of knuckle-dragging Ape walkers.
The new conceptualizations belong in a Michael Bay creative-design intern's garbage can; which is a fairly nice and considerably short way of putting it.
Everything about Force Awakens was fundamentally HELP I AM TRAPPED IN 2006 PLEASE SEND A TIME MACHINE - which is why I'm glad I waited two years and watched it for free on a free HBO sample weekend.
It was the try-hard attempt to outdo something that was already bigger and better, and it reached the point of lunatic stupidity as far as story/design is concerned.
I'm not saying a giant space-station that can pop planets like M80s is realistic - but it made a whole damn lot more sense than
Giant mecha Sun-eating magnifying glass planet. Call it what it is, kids.
It's HELP I AM TRAPPED IN 2006 PLEASE SEND A TIME MACHINE. It's *** HELP I AM TRAPPED IN 2006 PLEASE SEND A TIME MACHINE. That idea is so fundamentally HELP I AM TRAPPED IN 2006 PLEASE SEND A TIME MACHINE that you could actually hold a contest for first graders to come up with a better idea for a ten dollar grand prize -
AND THEY WOULD.
Go ahead. Throw around that "nostalgic fanboy" claim all you want - those people have a better vision of what Star Wars
should look like than J.J. Abrams or anyone at Disney does. Disney just wants the merchandising rights, but they don't actually know how to produce the kind of model to have the same level of success that 80's/90's Star Wars merchandise did. That's how we ended up with "Silvertits the Stormtrooper" and Darth Acne.
I can promise you that there weren't kids lining up and begging their parents to buy them Darth Tardhelmet the way Boba Fett and Vader figurines used to sell. It's a matter of fundamental design elements trying to be "out-done" by your facially pierced unicorn hair-dyed digital artists trying to put their own unique and modern twist on something that doesn't benefit from it.
Not to mention the countless thousand of "canon" Star Wars books and games that would've been the setup to a better story if they had consulted anyone that had ever seen or worked on Star Wars first. *** it, throw that ***out the window.
Say what you will, but the limited-resource Jim Henson/Frank Oz puppet show working under Light & Magic's thirty dollar budget was capable of producing a far greater cinematic presentation than Disney's billion dollar animation team will ever be capable of.
It's all just a bit too much-ery.
Predictions:
- Bad acting
- Affirmative Actiontroopers
- Return of Boba Fett at some point, despite him having little to no purpose in the current plot.
- Snoke is either Darth Nihilus, Darth Plagueis, or
this, like, super original character that we came up with all by ourselves!
- Palpatine's Star Destroyer shows up for no reason, blows up something unimportant; is ultimately destroyed by a chirping force-sensitive hamster that
accidentally fires a proton torpedo into
the only vulnerable point on a ship that could hold twenty of Vader's Executors.
(
Protip: The prequels were hard to watch because they replaced story and character development with S P E C I A L E F F E C T S . )