Well, Force Awakens.
Ok, first viewing combined with alcohol and a willingness to not give a damn and just have fun.
So at first I was like,
www.catutopia.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/HappyCat.jpgBut now I'm like,
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So yeah, first viewing, hell of a lot of fun, enjoyed it very much for very obvious reasons. I wanted Star Wars, I got Star Wars. SQUEEEEEA!
But then once you actually think of it as a film, it's...well, forgettable. Forgettable and meh. Not a bad film, mind, just boring. That's right, boring. Sort of. Fuck, it's complicated. Let's break this down.
CHARACTERS: FUCKED BY FEMINISM1. The Old See, what we got with A New Hope that worked was two major factors. We have our standard hero and hero's journey thing going. This hero is our guide into this new world and he's our self-projection protagonist. He's relatively bland, but likeable enough for us to stick around. The result is that we get to witness him growing into a full character through the journey, and we begin wanting him to succeed.
Every character we meet have a human dynamic with our protagonist, they all want different things, and we can see their relationships begin to grow and develop until we care about all of them as a group. Basic film story shit 101 - Bing, bang, boom, bada-dee-boop! There's really nothing magical or special or unique about this - it's basic as fuck, just done really well.
Force Awakens, on the other hand, went right ahead and fucked a cactus. Let's start with Finn.
A. Finn: Makes straight men wish they were gay. Finn is a GOD AMONGST FUCKING CHARACTERS. Seriously, I could not in my wildest dreams have even remotely imagined a character as fucking awesome as Finn was. Let me just gush here, you know, I'm just, I'm just gonna gush. First, what a from-nowhere actor! Jesus fucking Christ, I can STILL open a youtube clip of the scene where Rey's captured and Finn is running and just screaming "NO NO NO NO!" and I will fucking CRY! He's fucking brilliant, and this god damned guy needs more work and a motherfucking Oscar. He goes from fear to anger to desperation to pleading to grief on a god damned DIME.
Gushing over - this is one of the coolest characters I've ever seen in a blockbuster. Why? He's INTERESTING from the very beginning because he is tragic as fuck. He's not our protagonist, he can't be - he's too complex for that. But what makes him work is that no matter what's going on, I felt SAD for him. So fucking SAD every time he's on screen, that I felt like watching a puppy that's struggling. That makes me CARE about him.
See, this is a guy who has NO family, NO friends, NO purpose, NOTHING. And he loses EVERYTHING, and he loses this CONSTANTLY. From the very beginning of the film, he's seeking an identity and trying to be normal. He's trying to be human. And he meets Poe. That Poe/Finn Bromance was just....just... it's ALMOST as good as Russia's nuclear arsenal in its perfection. But the point is, Finn gets his name from this guy, gets a friend from this guy, for the first time in his life he isn't a fucking machine.
TWO MINUTES LATER HE'S DEAD.
Finn's alone again. He finds his first friend and has it ripped away two seconds later. I'll talk details on this later down this wall of china rant, but you see this happen CONSTANTLY with Finn. He's almost like a mentally disabled kid. He doesn't know any better. He's very innocent and very naive, literally like a child soldier. Everything he does, from beginning to end, is try to help people and have friends, no matter what. And it's CONSTANTLY being torn away from him. This guy is a god damned Greek tragedy, and he's just such a good person that I can't help but give a damn about every single thing he does and worry every single time he's in danger.
Especially because he NEVER SHOWS it. Not deliberately, that is. He never talks about it, he never whines about it, he never complains about it. It's not because he's a Saint, it's because he literally thinks that this is NORMAL. He doesn't realize just how traumatized he actually should be.
You know what, child soldier. That's all I can say, we have a brilliant actor playing a god damned child soldier and it's painful to watch and it's one of the best damned things I've seen in recent cinema.
B. Rey: Also makes straight men wish they were gay.Look, blatant misogyny aside, I'm serious on this one. Don't get the razor blades out yet, I'll make my problems here very clear when I get to the dynamic between Finn and Rey. For this bullet point, it's just about Rey. I'm going to absolutely vent my disgust and hatred for Rey once we get there though, but let's just talk objective character for now.
She's boring. That's the foundation of all the problems with this character. She's boring. But why? Luke was also, at a glance, boring. I mean, seriously, we're introduced to Luke and we see NOTHING of him except him being a moisture farmer on Tattoine. He does NOTHING at all that's interesting, cool, badass, anything. So why do I feel that Rey is boring and Luke wasn't?
The reason is that a standard protagonist like Luke is designed to
allow us to experience this new world along with the character. In a New Hope, we have no idea what the fuck is going on, where the fuck we are, what the fuck anything is.
Luke discovers all of this at the same time that we do. We learn what he learns.
His actual
character is built very subtly and in minor details, so that by the
end of the film we see him as an actual, unique, individual human being, but at the
beginning we associate him with ourselves and so don't question anything. For example, "I'm not such a bad pilot myself," and, (paraphrasing) "Your father was an excellent pilot." These are minor tidbits and details that tell us in a very smooth manner that, "This dude can fly." without shoving it down our throats or making him out to be badass. It's
important not to make this guy a badass from the get go in a film like Star Wars (That is, a universe that we don't understand, unlike a movie such as Taken).
Which takes us to Rey. She's basically our secondary (and primary) protagonist. The film did a very good job of giving these two protagonists relatively equal and murky and blurred levels of importance, but from the beginning I kind of feel that it's a movie about Rey, not Finn. Finn is simply too locked into the rules of his actual character. That is, he's not someone we can project onto nor is he someone that can guide us through a new world (because we've already seen this world, hint hint, getting to that later).
So Rey is basically our protagonist. Let's address the potential this character had, and what pisses me off a lot because of how much potential she really did have. There's a lot of aspects to Rey's character that people can understand and even relate to. You're stuck in a shitty situation and you want to escape. You're stronger (smarter/motivated/better/kinder) than the environment around you but life just keeps you down. Any American working in retail for minimum wage can connect with this kind of character concept. She's struggling to get by and she wants to live a life she can enjoy, have an adventure, etc. Very much like Luke, this is a character that can connect with younger people like myself.
She's alone. There's no hint of family or friend. Like Finn, she's alone. She's become hardened by this. Everyone around her wants to suck the last quarter out of her wallet. She works for everything she has, and she has too much pride to accept anything less than working and working hard to get by, all the while dreaming of applying herself to better things.
But then they FUCK IT! They FUCKED IT RAW AND THEN EXPECT ME TO EAGERLY SWALLOW THE GOAT CUM DRIPPING FROM THE BLOODY RUINS OF THE ASSHOLE THAT USED TO BE A FUNCTIONAL CHARACTER!
Ahem: Look, this is why I mentioned feminism above. I genuinely do believe that the attitudes of today fucked this aspect of the movie, and that this is also a bloody DAMAGING approach towards good female characters.See, they made her magic. Pussy magic. You see this dichotomy all the time in film that it's almost a stereotype.
Kill Bill did it right. Ghost in the Shell does it right. Harry Potter did it right. Aliens did it right. Legend of Korra did it right. Brienne of Fucking Tarth did it right. Even the fucking first
Resident Evil movie did it right.
Bottom line: There is NO SUCH THING as a strong female character. There's JUST STRONG CHARACTERS. Interesting and independent and strong INDIVIDUALS, regardless of their god damned genitalia.
So what do all of the above have in common?
Training. More importantly, characters
becoming stronger by working to become stronger. These are human beings, not women. They are not defined by their pussy or cock, they are defined by their actions, beliefs, and personality. Now, your most stereotypical male protagonists (Rambo/Commando) get around this by letting us know that they've already worked hard to become badass. They're soldiers, they're cops. The movie doesn't have to show us them
becoming stronger, it just needs to show them fuck shit up and we enjoy it. We don't need to see Brienne of Tarth become stronger, she's a motherfucking KNIGHT. We already know she's good with a sword, so we watch her face
other struggles which makes her an interesting character. Brienne of Tarth is forced to question her belief in Knighthood just like Robocop is forced to question his own humanity. These are both PEOPLE. Not men and not women, but HUMAN FUCKING BEINGS.
And like GoT and Robocop, Star Wars are more complex films that go into Die Hard territory. It's that balance of a character who is
vulnerable despite being a badass. They think on their feet, we can
see them overcome situations through their wits and their friends.
Rey is not John Mclane. She is NOT vulnerable. She is NOT weak. She has NOTHING to learn.
She can fight like hell and beat people down with a god damned stick despite being outnumbered from the beginning of the movie.
She can fly anything by magic and fly GOOD. She NEVER flew the Millennium Falcon, right? So what would have been excellent is a sense of her figuring out how to fly this damned ship (which they show and hint at) while risking being blown to shit because of this flaw.
Yet, she doesn't just FLY the ship. Oh no, she does a MOTHERFUCKING KULBIT IN THIS SHIP. THIS SHIP THAT SHE'S NEVER FLOWN BEFORE. SHE PERFORMS PYUGACHEV'S COBRAS AND KULBITS AND TAILSLIDES IN THIS MACHINE BY SHEER FUCKING MAGIC AND VODKA VODKA VODKA VODKA VODKA VODKA VODKA VODKA VODKA VODKA VODKA VODKA.
Vodka: ok, I was going to be calm, but then, SHE FORCE GRABS A MOTHERFUCKING LIGHTSABER. SHE'S NEVER HELD ONE. SHE'S NEVER HELD A SWORD. SHE PROCEEDS TO FUCKING FIGHT AND PARRY AND RIPOSTE AND PIVOT AND FUCKING SWORDFIGHT WITH A WEAPON THAT SHE SHOULD HAVE ZERO GOD DAMNED EXPERIENCE WITH WHAT THE FUCK WERE YOU GOD DAMNED COWARDS WRITING THIS THINK- OH SURE, WRITE A BULLSHIT FEMALE PROTAGONIST BECAUSE YOU THINK THIS CONSTITUTES A STRONG FEMALE CHARACTER AND THAT PEOPLE WILL EAT IT UP AND GIVE YOU THEIR MONEY, RIGHT!? SUCK THE FUCKING DOLLARS OUT OF CONSUMERS BECAUSE YOU THINK THAT WOMEN ARE TOO FUCKING STUPID TO COMPREHEND THE IDEA THAT VICARIOUS LIVING THROUGH A MOVIE CHARACTER ISN'T ACTUALLY SIGNI- FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU
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Look: you see this a lot. People are fucking scared to do female characters that are actual characters or interesting. I don't blame them. To make an interesting character, you have to hurt them. You have to challenge them and you have to make them grow stronger by overcoming those challenges. But what you get so much today is shit like Aeonflux where
all they do is make the female character a hardcore badass on such a painfully awkward tryhard level that it's like reading bad fan fiction.
But as an audience, we don't CARE about those characters. We care about characters that are HUMAN. And HUMANS suffer, strive, struggle, and change and grow stronger through their journeys.
I DARE anyone to try to write a female protagonist today without being afraid of pissing idiots (Yes, idiots) off. The vast majority of sane human beings do not live vicariously through a fictional protagonist. The vast majority of human beings are individuals who can judge themselves and feel good about betting themselves. And yet, a very vocal minority of broken, damaged, dead-inside people think, "This person did X. They have a pussy, I have a pussy, therefore I'm as good as person who did X because we both have pussy."
And this broke Rey's character. She's imperfectly perfect, and the only reason I can think of to explain this is that the writers were afraid of making her human because they felt that they'd piss the rattling can off if they ever dared to make her flawed. They had a damned good premise for her, and they pissed it away for marketing and sales money.
C. Finn/Rey DynamicThis is where it comes to a head. We have Finn, a broken, traumatized, shell of a human being. He latches onto Rey just because she
speaks to him like a human being, and he instantly tries to help her and protect her because he wants to have a friend.
This is very powerful. This is an incredibly interesting, complex situation that could set up a foundation for these two characters in terms of relationship. Let me put it this way, I cannot under any circumstances imagine Finn and Rey fucking. There is zero hint of romance here, which is incredibly refreshing and really interesting as well. They're not
male/female we fall in love", they're "I'm me and you're you, and we work together and we respect eachother". They're both seeking something and they both happen to seek it together.
Problem is: Rey is a major fucking bitch. And as I mentioned above, this is where she starts to actually piss me off. Why? Remember how I fucking CRY when Finn chases after Rey during her capture? Again: this is a dude who doesn't understand the world and has nothing. He loses his first friend within minutes after meeting him. Who does he meet next? Rey. He instantly latches onto her as, "You actually talked to me? You're my friend. I have a friend. Oh, thank god, I have a friend. What do friends do? We protect each other and help each other."
So it's incredibly powerful when Rey is captured and all that Finn does is LOSE HIS SHIT because all he sees in Rey is, "Another human, my friend, I have a friend, NO NO NO, NO YOU CAN'T DO THIS TO HER, NO, LET HER GO, NO NO NO NO PLEASE GOD DON'T HURT HER!"
Meanwhile, throughout the film, the
only thing Rey has done is act like a major *pauk-de lou-dte kalei* to Finn. Again, they HAD potential. They COULD have shown her growing open to the idea of trusting someone. They had that establishment of her character as being closed off and independent because of her environment. But she NEVER cares about Finn. She NEVER goes out of her way to help or protect Finn. She's selfish in the worst possible way.
They don't portray her as someone who's healing, they portray her as a fucking asshole. When they escape Tattooine 2.0, Finn
instantly grabs her arm and starts dragging her to cover. He knows what's coming, he knows the capabilities of the Empire remnants, and he's trying to protect another human being by dragging Rey to cover.
All Rey can do is shout, "Don't hold my hand!" AKA: "I don't NEED you. I don't NEED anyone, because I'm A BADASS STRONG INDEPENDENT WOMAN BECAUSE I HAVE A PUSSY!"
She treats everything around her with disdain unless it's in her own self interest. R2-D2 V.20? Fuck off. Finn? Fuck off. Oh, Han Solo!? NOW She cares because it's related to what she wants.
Fuck, Princess Leia actually WAS badass. And she actually WAS human. Princess Leia somehow did the "I'm above you" condescending attitude and WASN'T a horrible human being. When Princess Leia was being 'rescued' from the Death Star and got her hands on a fucking Blaster, I honestly felt and to this day feel that she was more competent with that blaster than Luke was. And I
respected her for it, even though I knew nothing about her character at that point. Everything she said and did made sense and was justified. "Some Rescue", totally true. And then she takes charge and blows open the vent to the sewage, and even reinforced her confidence and authority with, "Someone has to save our skins."
She takes command, she takes control, which is exactly what we expect a leader (Princess!) to do, and she never felt like an asshole doing it.
Kylo Ren: Pissed my pantsLook, I could do a whole post on this guy, all I want to say is that I feel he doesn't deserve the hate he gets and is actually an awesome and amazing character and he scared the shit out of me.
Moving on:
2.How they could have saved itIgnoring all the minor details of fixing Rey's character, there is just one moment that
killed this movie. Namely, it's the final nail in the coffin. Final battle, final Lightsaber duel. Finn gets the lightsaber, tries to fight an injured Ren, and DIES. FUCKING DIES.
Yeah, I know that we don't know if he's not dead or just injured, but I basically meant to say GETS FUCKED UP LIKE SMOKED SALMON ON A RUSSIAN'S TABLE.
And then Rey finally 'clicks' with her force sensitivity and gets the lightsaber.
If you changed NOTHING in this film before this point, and then did this, it could have changed everything. This would have changed our understand of Rey as a character, it would have set up the sequel, it would have made it a legitimate film instead of just a blockbuster movie.
Here it is: Finn, the friend you've been running with until now, has just had his SPINE CUT OPEN. This whole time, Rey has been a closed off, isolated, wannabe try-hard pretending to be the Terminator because of her own psychological issues.
I ask you this: imagine if on seeing Finn lying face down in the snow, for all intents and purposes, DEAD, Rey actually reacted? Actually freaked out and ran to his body to try and see if he's alive. Actually showed some FUCKING EMOTION in seeing your only friend cut down by a lightsaber. Imagine if her armor finally cracked and you saw that this whole time she had CARED about Finn because he was a decent human fucking being?
Now imagine her anger. I quote Riddick, "You killed everything I ever knew."
Imagine Rey getting that lightsaber after seeing her ONLY FUCKING FRIEND IN THE ENTIRE WORLD die right in front of her. (Note: not die objectively, but in the moment, she could easily assume he's fucking dead). The response? Anger .Rage. Sheer, fucking fury.
Can you not imagine how emotional that could have been? This whole time, Rey has put on this facade of wannabe badassery where she pretends to be a badass (and comes off as a *pauk-de lou-dte kalei*) and at this point shows her actual emotions and reacts to the loss of her first and only actual friend?
Which leads us to: She goes to the dark side. Because this shit makes no sense. We're talking about Kylo Ren here. He's OBSESSED with becoming and surpassing Vader. He trains with his light saber. He probably built it himself. He's a hardcore assshole, literally punching himself in his own wound to pump himself up. NOBODY should be able to beat him in lightsaber combat except a trained Jedi.
Except the dark side. It's rage and fury and raw aggression. It's beats threats down with sheer strength that comes from anger. The only way Rey should have even remotely been able to beat down Kylo Ren is by subtly using the dark side of the force. She sees Finn cut down in the snow, she feels loss, she feels grief, and in accordance with her character, she feels FAILURE at being skilled at what she does. She snaps, and we have the equivalent of the Return of the Jedi scene where Luke just fucking wails on Vader in sheer, brute force.
THAT would have been powerful. THAT would have set up the sequel. She could have met Luke Skywalker at the end of the film after literally turning and using the DARK SIDE OF THE FORCE to achieve her goal by beating the fucking of Kylo with sheer fucking aggression.
Instead, what we got was this:
Fuck Finn. She doesn't care about Finn. He's possibly dead right in front of her and we don't see a tear. This is the same dude who ran SCREAMING through a battlefield in horror and fear that he was going to lose Rey. This was a dude who probably would have flown to the ends of the Galaxy to rescue his friend. This is a dude who I could even imagine DYING to protect his friends.
And he has his back sliced open, and Rey doesn't shed a damned tear. She doesn't give a fuck about him. She's an evil, evil, abusive, selfish, self-centered, monster of a human being.
All because the writers thought that "This is what a strong female character is, lol lol give us your money."
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2. Plot/Theming/Pacing/ComplexityLook, fuck plot. Star Wars was never about an interesting story, it was about the characters and their interactions. Good guy blows up bad guy station, yadadadada. So there's no more to comment on.
Let's got on to what made Star Wars actually work: a very standard 101 hero's journey that was executed incredibly well. This worked because we were entering a new a world and Luke guided us through that new world. We always wanted to see what happened next because we were learning something new about this world with every scene.
Problem is that now you have a sequel, and when watching this sequel, we already know what the world is. The original 2 sequels compensated for this by bringing us back to our characters. When we get to Jedi, we already know what Tattooine is and how it works. We're not discovering it anymore. But now we're watching Luke the Jedi do his his shit. He's surpassed us as an audience, he's become his own character and not just a blank slate for us to project onto. For the first film, they hooked us with the world, and for the sequels they hooked us with the characters.
Well, guess what, Force Awakens gives us nothing new to work with. They INTRODUCE the new concept of the Remnants of the Empire. We see that it's there, but we don't actually
understand it.
Next: complexity.
Look, I can still track the chain of events of a New Hope in my head to this day. I can do this because it was simple. I naturally process it in my head as 3 major scenes. Tattooine, Death Star, Attack on death Death Star. Every scene transitioned well into the next. It was smooth, it flowed, and it did well to cement in my head what happened in the film.
Force Awakens? I honestly can't tell you the chain of events. I remember scenes, but I don't remember arcs. I literally don't remember (despite having watched it 3 times) how Finn and Rey got onto whatever the fuck that planet was where Rey got captured. I literally can't remember how Rey escaped her capture. It's like Watchmen.
I quote Ebert (albeit from memory), "It's a film full of disconnected moments, but what moments!"
I cry like a bitch when Finn chases after Rey. I actually WISH that hardcore storm-trooper that just shouted, "Traitor!" didn't die and becomes an actual character and challenge point for Finn. But ultimately, Force Awakens is a product.
The first time I saw it, that scene aboard the millennium Falcon with the random alien monster set off alarm bells in my head. Keep in mind, this was during my
first viewing and I was already thinking, "What the fuck is this? Stop wasting my time."
It was literally padding time. 5 minutes spent on a meaningless, bullshit scene that doesn't matter where we all know that all 4 characters (Finn/Rey/Chewie/Solo) are going to be just FUCKING FINE.
You see moments like this throughout the film. Finn and Rey steal the Falcon and you have 3 seconds of the Falcon's new owner, "That's MIIIINE!".
It's transformers level shit of pathetic. I'm not even talking about fan-service here, I'm talking about shit thrown into this movie that didn't need to be there and doesn't matter.
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Which, because I'm too drunk to coherently continue, brings me to my final point. The Force Awakens wasn't a film, it was a product. You can see the edges and you can see the design. It was manufactured to make people buy it and spread it to other people to buy it. It isn't a film, it isn't art, it's just a fucking cash cow.
Look at it this way, can you explain to me why this film
needs to exist? It doesn't teach us anything new about the Star Wars world, it doesn't introduce any new ideas, it doesn't change anything. This film is literally unnecessary. And when you have an unnecessary film, that only answer is that it's a cash grab.
Star Wars has now become the new Avengers. Make a cheap, shitty, boring, bland film that follows a proven formula for making dumb fucks spend their money on nonsense, and then repeat and repeat and REPEAT AND FUCKING REPEAT until people spend a BILLION FUCKING DOLLARS on a can of Spam that's pretending to be fresh Sushi.
I'm going to go pass out now. Pardon the beer talk, feel free to actually chat/debate with me if you disagree with anything.