I didn't mind him unmasked because until then you don't really notice that he's basically just a petulant child, it was more the fact that he's so recognisable that it took me out of it a bit.

Also, somehow Greg ****ing Grunberg managed that too.

I haven't actually watched a Star Wars film in about 10 years and somehow this film coming out has turned me into a massive kid again. I keep thinking about it and spotting all the toys they're peddling, and now I want ALL THE BB-8 STUFF.

BB-8 for president.

Yeah, I don't mind him being unmasked period, I just hope it's back on to some degree in the next movie because I like it.

I re-watched all three OT movies this week, and I have to say it didn't really add much context to the new film. It only highlighted how different action movies are today compared to the 70s/80s. If I could complain that the new movie is "bad" compared to the OT, I might as well say that ALL new action movies tend to have too much going on.

I want to complain about something that bugged me in both viewings... but the map piece is simply too large of a portion of the galaxy to not be recognized. I really don't get why it wasn't enough, considering how much of a void of the galaxy map it filled. Maybe I missed something, but this was my impression both times.

That's the kind of detail that you should just ignore in this kind of movie. If you don't, you'll start getting worked up about things such as timers that don't count down seconds in real time.

I used to count to check whether a movie timer was in real time or not. Remember the countdown near the end of Aliens? I was very happy to figure out that was in real time.

I'm just here to say I liked it!

Absolute crap. George Lucas must be spinning in his grave.

Come on, you owe it to yourself to put at least a little bit of effort into your troll posts, so that they aren't totally transparent.

Wait, my bad. Living people don't spin in their graves. That's no troll, it's a sarcasm.

I've seen it twice and enjoyed it more the second time ha. I really enjoyed it.

It's kinda like Jurassic World in a way - start of a new trilogy and the plot is kinda the same as the original (also obviously breaking box office records too).

I just hope episode 8 isn't a rehash of Empire (Rey abandons Luke during her training to rescue Poe and Finn - Finn gets taken to a Stormtrooper rehab facility. Kylo Ren is revealed to be her brother etc...)

Instead I hope that Kylo Ren -TWIST- is plotting to kill Snoke all along and he has to kill his dad (and generally do bad things) so Snoke trusts him. That would be interesting - especially if Luke gave him the mission. I know that's extremely far fetched though but I want something like this that nobody sees coming

Fan theory making the rounds is that it's some Naruto bull**** where Snoke created the Skywalkers to be powerful hosts to his immortal soul.

Even though I use words like "sucked" and "horrible" to describe the film I don't hate it. I'm rather indifferent to it.

I went into this film as unspoiled as possible without disconnecting entirely from the internet. I had seen the teaser and been exposed to some theories but that's about it. Up until recently I was watching trailers for any and every thing but Terminator Genisys' huge trailer spoiler has made me generally avoid all trailers now.

First, what did I like? I generally thought the colored boy did a good job. The young lady in the film did pretty well too. Peter Mayhew did the best job of all the returning cast followed closely by Kenny Baker up until R2D2 woke up. Some of the First Order stuff looked close enough to the Imperial stuff from the original trilogy to be cool. Probably something I'm forgetting but I'll catch it again on Netflix someday and probably find some more to like.

What didn't I like or understand? First, WTF is up with the new government? We're not even shown them fighting The First Order. There's the "Resistance". Do we have a resistance because the new government is just partying it up or something? Oh well. Doesn't really matter since that world got blown the **** up while apparently orbiting the world Old Solo was on.

Okay, so The First Order. Jesus Blessed Christ. WTF is this? The Empire would have been severely damaged by the end of ROTJ but 40 years later it's full of angsty kids and half the stormtroopers have ****? When I started to be exposed to this special stormtrooper with shiny metal armor and a name I tried to look away before the name even registered. And then SHE turned out to be a joke and an idiot. A Star Wars cartoon series can produce strong female villains but Abrams can't. ****ing embarrassing.

There's no excuse for how bad Kylo Ren was with a lightsaber. If he got good at nothing else you would think he would have been good with a saber. Two untrained kids held up pretty damned good to him. He was shown to be extremely powerful so if it weren't for that part of the film I could forgive this lapse.

Ford just absolutely sucked in the film and I say that as someone that used to just adore all of his performances. From a story point of view this could be explained as deep depression but the implication is that he and Chewie had been back out on their own for quite sometime in fairly dangerous endeavors. I just don't think he should have seemed so rusty and slow given the circumstances. His character seemed to be a dead man walking which made his death so utterly emotionless. I also found it asinine that in all their adventures Han wouldn't have exchanged weapons with Chewie if only for target practice.

It seemed very odd to me that when Chewie returned from the mission that Solo was killed on he walked right past Fisher and she never looked at him and instead hugged the young lady he rescued. We finally are later privy to a very brief segment of him mourning and then R2 wakes up and I thought for sure R2 would go to Chewbacca but, no, he plays around with the cute little BB droid. Interesting side note, I keep wanting to call that droid BB-88.

Of course I could go on and I want to confess that I didn't really read any of the previous posts. Why bother? It is what it is. In conclusion, I don't hate the film but Abrams has pissed all over the franchise, marking his territory. He's the alpha now. I'm distressed to think that now that this film has become the most overrated movie in history it will probably just get worse from here. Time will tell. At least there are still a few interesting games to play.

Wasn't too shabby.

**** you, redneck. Go away.

Ah, there it is.

I've missed all you guys

Kak, he was being serious?

(Maybe he really doesn't know Lucas is still alive?)

Missed you too, sweetie.

The Darth Plaguies bull****.



You are a complete insufferable and irremediable idiot.

He's not a redneck. He's from Washington, they don't get enough sun for his neck to turn red.

The correct term is "cascadian hill person"

Oh, Jon, you see...

I was doing the thing where I was kind of doing the thing that he was doing but I was doing it to him to illustrate...

Well, **** it. Let's just move along.

Wookie: Congratulations on being the bad guy of every story ever told.

I don't understand what anyone, especially a family man in his 40s, would get out of coming back here just to troll about five other people at this point.

That's because due to your upbringing in the socialist utopia of Finland, you are incapable of comprehending the mechanics of the American conservative's reptilian brain.

Which doesn't put you far removed from most sane Americans.

The conservative brain seems to consist primarily of some sort of misguided sense of toughness, general prejudice toward anyone that is not a conservative, a belief that it's okay to contend that you need to be armed at all times in a modern, civilized country, a misplaced sense of superiority based on nationalism that grows from some kind of bizarre abstract sense of American freedom being different than the kind they have in dozens of other countries, a natural mandate to be crappy to your fellow human beings for whatever reason you want to (and this takes the form of being outraged at whatever political correctness is currently in the news, because it's too hard to not be a dick to everyone), and it's pretty much all tied together with a bunch of scraps of twine and cemented inside the brain cavity using a mixture of sawdust and Elmer's Glue.

But mainly it's just that no matter how many backward screwed up beliefs you have wrapped up in the bird's nest of a brain you've got, you make sure you let all those uppity liberals know they aren't no better then you.

tl;dr

It's because we're the only people he knows that still listen to anything he has to say. His sect of American society is literally dying off every day before his eyes, and we all get to watch as his political party is exposed as the hate group it has been for decades by a man who is either brilliant enough to take advantage of the morons for free publicity, or dumb enough to think that anyone who isn't a whacko will vote him into office.

This is all he has left. I just wish the forums could still possibly be around for us to hear him complain about how his son grew up to be a liberal or ends up coming out of the closet. The first would be poetic justice in the purest form, and the second would actually either force Wookie06 to grow a soul by accepting it, or admit he never had one to begin with by disowning him.

They still have a lot of time left. They only started regulating lead exposure in 1975.

Holy hell that's incisive. I'd apologize that you've had to be around conservatives long enough to come up with that, but the truth is that we're all bombarded with their idiocy through the media (regardless of our personal connections).

None of Republicans, social regressives, nor neoliberals are in any meaningful way conservative. Correspondingly, most conservatives aren't so bad. Certainly not as bad as Wookie06 would represent them.


The first thing to understand about modern core conservatives is that their angst mostly comes from vote buying. You shouldn't disregard their concerns: pork barrel projects, subsidies, regulatory capture, redistricting, and, yes, even social programs, are potentially subversive of democracy. It's not hard to see, for example, that the biggest public goods projects tend to go to the districts that voted for the winning party. It's also almost impossible to remove a corrupt incumbent once he has successfully bought key demographics, even if his government acts to the harrowing detriment of the majority. Vote buying is very real, and it is very bad.

The Republicans and Democrats are equally guilty of this corruption, and so are the Liberals and Conservatives in Canada. Only Libertarian parties offer an answer to these concerns, but unfortunately their answer happens to be ludicrous. Nobody is interested in answering the real concerns of core conservatives.

So, from the above, the second important thing to understand about conservatives is that they rightly feel ignored and betrayed and, well, furious. They see the government as irredeemably corrupt, and the average voter as complicit in its corruption. This was the basic complaint of the early Tea Party movement, before business interests started pulling it in a few zany directions. (Not that you'd know it based on how the Tea Party was framed by the media at the time.)

This leads to the third and final thing you should understand about core conservatives: they know, correctly, that there just aren't enough people who would knowingly vote against someone buying their vote. That means they don't believe they can have an honest discussion about their concerns. That means, they frame a lot of economic and political issues as social issues, and send it off to the fire and brimstone types in order to raise enough popular support. Conservatives don't consider social regressives conservative; in fact, they view them as the problem, corrupt voters who have been bought in exchange for a seat at the grown-ups table.

Now, two questions for you -

After reading the above descriptions, do you really consider all conservatives insufferable? and,

Do you see anything of Wookie06 in the above?

Being conservative in America means you think we need to be able to fight the entire world at once, claim that you're pro-life yet support the death penalty, talk about how anything government related doesn't work, vote for people who make campaign promises to ensure that the government will not be effective in any of the areas that represent its need to exist, spout platitudes about how anyone in a terrible situation just needs to toughen up and get a job, believe that in order for one sort of people to be given rights they did not previously possess somehow means that the people who already had those rights now have less freedom, disagree with any scientific analysis that is inconvenient for your political aspirations, be paranoid about Sharia Law while simultaneously demanding legislation based on religion, possess some ludicrous belief that if we enable the super-rich to make more money then they'll happily pass those profits on to the consumer, and a belief that we should engage in open war with literally anyone who disagrees with America.

Oh yeah, and truly believe that America is the greatest country in the world. After all, these are the people who say government should stay out of your life yet propose to create legislation that will prohibit certain types of individuals from marrying.

America is the greatest country in earth, as long as you don't ever expect any of it to change. Other countries have been working on figuring this **** out for hundred of years, and somehow conservatives think we had it nailed down by about 1950.

Guess what: The founding fathers knew that they didn't have the solution to every problem, and that they couldn't somehow see the future. This is why we have amendments.

13% of Americans approve of congress.
62% of Americans approve of their own congressional representatives.

Gallup, 2013. I mean, just in case you didn't believe me.

Does it?

I think the proof of the pudding is in the tasting, here. Social conservatives were in power for 10 years in Canada, 4 years of which were unchecked by the opposition. Despite saying all of the same things as American conservatives, and occasionally even slightly worse things, they never revisited the abortion issue, and they never repealed gay marriage. Those issues seemed important enough to table, but apparently not important enough to act upon. They did other horrendous things, but the social regressive part of their platform was squelched the day the election was over.

It might be different in the United States, but that's sort of my thesis: the inmates are running the asylum. The Republican party isn't acting in the interests of conservative voters; maybe their social regressive cohort, or maybe corporate interests, but definitely not conservatives.

I'll admit, this is an awful long way to go to call Wookie06 a useful idiot, but it has the benefit of conclusively proving that he's one.

I'm with Brian. The film was entertaining. And I felt like it represented Star Wars well. Also I had lots of feels.

This is what bothers me the most: the idea that democracy can't bring about the government desired by conservatives, so that all sorts of anti-intellectual narratives get incorporated into "conservative" propaganda. It just creates an immense amount of noise, divides the voting populace, and allows the less educated members of the Republican party to be proud of their ignorance.



Of course not. The vote buying problem you mention is very real, and even Bernie Sanders makes me nervous when it comes to the deficit.



I don't see Wookie06 so much as conservative (in your sense of the word), but instead merely as a troll playing an obnoxious social regressive, who will probably come in to say he hasn't had the time to read all our posts, but <insert mix of backpedaling and slightly less inflammatory remarks>.

I was speaking about the conservative base, not the elected officials. The elected officials entertain these bizarre and harmful views because they know the people who hold them are the only ones dumb enough to vote them into office so they can implement policies that don't help 99% of their constituency.

The best thing about TFA is that Darths an Droids will (probably) continue. With Kylo Ren having the same first name as one of their characters I don't see how they could resist it.

I watched it again and agree it was better the second time around. I love the scenes with the wrecked star destroyer and AT-AT. I also loved all the X-wing scenes, just totally bad ass. My brother watched it in 3d and said it was awesome so I suppose I'll watch it a third time at some point before it leaves theaters.

The only part I didn't like is the implication that after one of his students went psycho, Luke Skywalker just gave up and ran away. Doesn't seem like the Luke that was portrayed in previous movies. Hopefully they'll be some better explanation once the next movie comes out.

I'm going to see it once or twice more, but here's my initial thoughts

Characters

- Kylo Ren. My sister and cousin both think he's an angsty Severus Snape clone. However, I quite like the setup. He comes off as a badass, but once you get to him, he's weak, emotional, and very unstable. Like our heroes, this is a character that has to develop. He's almost the Anti-Finn. Where Finn is trying to leave the First Order, Ren is trying to become one with it. He seems to know that the **** he's pulling is bad, and it's hard for him to kill Solo, but he knows he has to if he wants to fulfill the destiny he believes Snoke laid out for him. I'm actually very interested in this character. (Antony sums up this character perfectly)
- Rey. She's okay. I like how it's established early on that she's self-sufficient and capable in multiple forms of combat (Beats up Unkar Plutt's thugs on Jakku with her staff and then proceeds to do some damn fine shooting on the forest world). I got super pumped when she had the Force vision (Which was perfect), and made me realize that the film's marketing was a clever red-herring in trying to get everyone thinking that Finn was the next Jedi.
- Finn. Interesting character. I think he kind of defected too quickly. For him to defect, I imagine he's seen some **** far worse than the villager massacre or the dying stormtrooper pitfully grasping for Finn as he died. But I think that Phasma said it was Finn's first mission, so maybe it was first mission trauma, or something.
- BB-8. I love this little ****. Just because of the blow torch "thumbs-up."
- Poe Dameron. I love this guy's personality. He's very fun. Problem is, his character really didn't do a whole lot. He was kind of like Wedge Antilles with a personality and more screen time, but otherwise he was just there to blow up something in the end. Hopefully the next film doesn't shaft him as much, because I like his personality.
- Captain Phasma. She got the Hell marketed out of her. I was expecting she'd do nothing, and that's what she did. She looks cool, but that's about it. She sells toys. However, I like her badass exterior holding out until the gun was pushed to her head, where she proceeded to fold like a bad hand. Of course the troopers are trained to die, but officer's are cowards.
- Snoke. Heh, snake. He was okay. I don't think we should have seen his face so early. This movie was lacking in reveals by revealing things waaaay to early.
- Maz Kanata. Okay side character. Quirky character, I hope she comes back.
- Han Solo. I like this Solo. He's kind of like the old fool-heardy one we love, but he's wiser at the same time. He's emotionally broken up but manages to hide it with snark and cynicism. However, I honestly thought he was going to ignore Leia and try to just shoot Ren. I don't know why. I thought he was just going to be stubborn. When Wookieepedia was hacked I saw the death notice, but thought it was a troll. During the actual scene, my heart was pounding hoping it wasn't true. Han was always one of my faves, pretty much in my number two spot under Lord Katarn, so this was emotionally disturbing for me. For some reason.
- Leia Organa. My audience kept applauding for old stuff when it appeared, but then they got quiet when she stepped onto the screen. I think the audience was disappointed that she wasn't in a bikini. I don't know. She was okay, but didn't do much. Her backstory in other material was handled better. Film skimped.
- Luke Skywalker. *laughs* He looks good in a beard, though.
- Ello Asty. Hardly a character, but I was looking forward to this character, hoping he'd be the next Wedge. Then he got killed like a *****. What the Hell screenwriter.
- Zuvio. WHERE WAS THIS GUY? OH MY GOD WHAT?


Events
- Lightsaber battle. Kylo is rusty. And it works. He's not a great fighter, or he's severely out of practice. Note that he managed to kill some of Luke's other students, so he must be somewhat skilled in Lightsaber combat if he didn't just stab them in the back. I like how Finn tries, after it's established he sucks with the lightsaber anyways. Seeing that Solo died moments ago, I actually thought that Finn died when Kylo spine slashed him. Rey does well when she hones in, and as I said: it's established that she's a competent melee combatant while on Jakku. Still, it's a fight filled with amateurs, and as a result, its very grisly. Rey just grabbing the lightsaber with the Force, overpowering Kylo yet again and proving that she's stronger was just pure awesome. Both actors performing incredibly well sells a lot of this, too.
- Misc. Battles. They're okay.
- Aliens. I loved a lot of this. I found it a little odd we didn't see too many familiar faces, though. We see a Mon Calamari and a Sullustan in the alliance base, but everything else is a new alien. Cool, and the effects are cool, but did all Rodians die off or something? There's an Ithorian look-a-like and something called a Nu-Cosian (Which is a vaguely different Cosian?), and I honestly thought the big lizard guy (Grummgar is the character's name) was a big fat, over weight Bossk. I mean, the clothes were similar. Maybe his head got misshapen with age? I just found it odd we didn't have too many familiar faces at all. Instead, we get a gaggle of new aliens. Big Galaxy, I guess.
- "Nopetroopers." Just hilarious.

- The story. I mean, it's really similar to the original. Droid has piece of information, goes to desert planet to get it to rebel group, finds fledgling Jedi and friends, meet a smuggler and his Wookiee, deliver droid to rebel group, destroy super weapon that destroyed a planet. I mean, there's a lot of different stuff, and the story is more character driven than plot oriented, and the plot is rather simple, as was the original film's. I think we watch this because of the characters and side-conflicts. I don't mind a simple story, sometimes those work the best when other things add to it (Mad Max: Fury Road comes to mind), but this time it's weird because, we saw this plot. Those in the EU have seen this plot a lot. Like really, a lot. Dark Forces was essentially a "Destroy the Weapon" plot. I guess it's the journey that we watch, and the characters, and I guess it's different than trying to defeat a villain, or an evil plot, and it just goes to show almost many action movies have very similar plots to a degree.

Oh, I forgot: The Reveals.

If there was thing I really didn't like, it was the schmuck reveals.

We shouldn't have known Kylo was Han's son until about when he killed him. It should have been alluded too, and maybe we could have seen his face in a picture, then. With that said, I think we shouldn't have seen Kylo's face even until Han or Kylo took the mask off during their confrontation. Then we could have seen this young, normal looking boy trying to live up to his father's legacy. We shouldn't have seen Snoke's face so early. The main reveals were poorly handled, imo.