Okay, I had lunch. It's supposed to storm and I'm typing with a bandaged finger I just vegetable-peeled, but we can do this. Multiple copies in this house and somehow I don't have a director's commentary: The Force Awakens #sithmas
Despite my OT reminiscences, TFA is the movie that actually made me a Star Wars fan, and if that makes me a Fake Fan Girl, then fellas, let's fake it up #sithmas
So I have now watched six star wars in story order (didn't have Phantom Menace on hand). We have seen angry adolescent Anakin go through corruption, redemption, an empire, and two Death Stars. #sithmas
Return of the Jedi puts us at a place where, in theory, we have put this entire saga to bed and found resolution. And yet we always knew there would be 9 Episodes. I don't know how much of this was in Lucas' original plans. #sithmas
But TFA is all about Doing the Same Damn Thing All Over Again. Some people didn't like this at the time. But IMO there's a strange prescient quality to this movie, released in 2015, in terms of the re-rise of fascism. #sithmas
Would people really make the same damn mistakes and try the same damn oppressive schemes all over again? APPARENTLY #sithmas
But I will go TO THE MAT for this movie, for the idea that telling "the same old [New Hope] story" with characters like these fundamentally changes that story. HOPE YOU WANNA HEAR ABOUT IT #sithmas
I would also argue that while we know the OT stormtroopers are real people, they might as well be droids--unlike the clone troopers in the prequels, we never see their faces. Pew pew pew, no blood. #sithmas
So TFA IMMEDIATELY shows a battle from a stormtrooper's POV, shows his comrade dying and marking him out for us with a bloody handprint. We have NEVER been asked to empathize with a stormtrooper before. #sithmas
And it immediately reverberates back through the OT, the way the clone troopers reverberate forward: wait, if these are people whose faces we've seen... the Adventure Serial shoot-em-ups play a little differently now. #sithmas
And the theme of the next movie, if not this one as well, is "we are gonna keep making the same damn mistakes if we don't consider what our way of doing this is doing to other people." #sithmas
The Max Von Sydow character being the age he is also reminds me of older people today saying, "I can't believe I lived to see this happen again." #sithmas
So this opening manages to introduce so much in such a short amount of time, it's so economical, considering. Re: the village, I'm also not sure we saw the Empire being quite this brutal in the OT. #sithmas
I'm sure the Empire troops probably did raze villages and execute everyone on sight, but we never saw it. We saw them blow up a planet we had no faces for (except, later, Bail Organa). #sithmas
So we are immediately introduced, as far as we have seen, to a First Order that is faster, meaner, sleeker, doesn't care who you are, gonna kill everything in sight to get one simple thing they want. #sithmas
And we see Poe kill Finn's friend, sending him into shock on the battlefield. #sithmas
So here's Kylo Ren. I cannot say enough about what they did with this character. Somehow they intuited the zeitgeist of angry white/male toxic entitlement. He is literally a Darth Vader fanboy and cosplayer. #sithmas
But his cloak is ragged, his saber sparks, it's all kind of homebrew and not quite right. He's simultaneously terrifying and petulant in a way the prequels couldn't--didn't WANT to--manage. #sithmas
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