Re: Ep7 Reviews (Spoilers)
Posted: 2015-12-21 02:01am
Finally saw The Force Awakens for the first time this afternoon. I will admit I was pleasantly surprised by it; it wasn't as overwhelming as I might have hoped, but it also didn't make my worst fears come true. I'm writing this before reading any other reviews or major spoilers, so this is purely my own speculation throughout.
My kids, 5 and 4 now, both watched it and were mostly riveted throughout. BB-8 definitely achieved its role of comic relief and cracked them up multiple times, and they both had a big “wow” moment when R2 finally appeared.
But first, let me get something off my chest:
THEY KILLED HAN! YOU BASTARDS!
Ahem.
Started off thinking Jakku was Tatooine. I suppose this is a rather understandable mistake, given that literally the only difference between them was the number of suns. Jakku is literally a stand-in desert wasteland planet, continuing with the old Star Wars trope of one-climate planets.
Still have no idea who the old guy was supposed to be at the beginning, other than somebody who was in the Rebellion back during the OT.
From the trailers, I wasn't sure what Fin was – I thought he might have been dressed as a stormtrooper in disguise. As soon as I saw the trooper hesitating in the beginning it started to make more sense. It was a rather convenient—almost to the point of being contrived—plot point that Fin just happened to break Poe out when he did. Also left me seriously wondering about the First Order's internal security standards when a fresh-out-of-training trooper can just waltz into the prisoner block, set a high-level prisoner free, and then bluff his way all the way to the hangar bay. Clearly their standards of recruiting have dropped since the Emperor died.
The old Star Destroyers crashed on the planet were a nice touch. Really helps to show the scale of the Galactic Civil War. We're pretty used to modern day shipwrecks getting cleaned up quickly; this is more reminiscent of the age of sail, when wrecks literally would sit on the rocks until they broke up. Maybe the Aral Sea would be a more appropriate modern analogy. I'm guessing that it's not worth salvaging the wrecks from backwaters like Jakku compared to more important core worlds.
Had a sneaking suspicion that the old “pile of junk” they stole was the Falcon, and was glad to be proven correct. The banter about the modifications really brought back the OT feel - the Falcon is practically as much of a character as anyone in the OT, as the characters struggle to keep her running.
The eventual big reveal – of Kylo Ren being Han and Leia's son Ben – wasn't as much of a surprise to me as I feel like they were trying to make it out to be. It was more or less a Cliffs Notes version of the Darth Caedus (ick) plotline from the post-NJO books, swapping Han for Mara Jade and cutting out all the pointless subterfuge. They really managed to capture every single bad trait from Jacen's characterization from the NJO onward, then turned it up to 11. He comes across as a whiny, heartless emo bitch who makes AoTC/RoTS Anakin look like a tragic character, and that's quite the accomplishment. The boy literally has no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Bravo, writers, he is a cardboard cutout.
I had a feeling they were going to kill off Han when Leia sent him off to try and turn Jacen Kylo Ben back. Not telegraphed. At all.
As for the big bad, I found Supreme Leader Snoke far less intimidating than Palpatine. Sure, he's got as much of an overcompensation problem as ol' Palpy did, what with the massive holograms and all, but he never said no to Jacen Kylo. The general (who? His name wasn't really clear either) was also clearly exasperated with Jacen Kylo's faulty instincts hampering their efforts at every level. I can only wonder what Snoke sees in him – useful distraction while seeking a real prize, perhaps?
On to the fun part: technology.
Let's start off with the Ultimate Weapon. (Since they never referred to it once as anything but “the Weapon” this is what I'm dubbing it for now.) It's some sort of “hyperspace cannon” which sucks up the entire mass of a star, somehow concentrates it into multiple independently targetable beams, and then shoots the whole thing through hyperspace – yet strangely still visible to the naked eye – in a giant red beam that obliterates everything in its path.
Somehow, for all its massive bulk, it still fails to be as intimidating as the first Death Star. Aside from the whole oops-there's-a-tiny-yet-devastating thermal exhaust port flaw, if the Death Star showed up in your system and you didn't have (a) the plans and (b) Force-sensitive fighter pilots handy, you were screwed.
In contrast, the Ultimate Weapon just fires out of the blue, so the poor targets never really realize what's about to hit them until it's too late. Fat lot of good that extra planetary girth does you for intimidation when they never even see it coming. Its impenetrable shields can be breached by the simple yet nearly suicidal act of jumping through them in hyperspace – why didn't anyone else ever think of doing so in the entire pre-retcon history of Star Wars? – and all one needs to take it down is a few bumbling characters winging a plan with a pack full of thermal detonators on the word of a former stormtrooper who happened to be stationed in sanitation there. My, how the Resistance has fallen from the elite Rebel commando teams of yesteryear.
Well, at least the First Order remembered to clear all indigenous lifeforms off the planet before they turned it into a superweapon. At least they remembered that from Endor.
Moving onto the fun part: calculations. The Ultimate Weapon is fueled by literally sucking up the entire goddamned mass of a main sequence star. What it does with that mass is unknown, but has something to do with technobabble that requires a highly vulnerable harmonic stabilizer in order to not spontaneously revert back to a stellar state.
Whatever it's doing, it can't just be harvesting the energy produced by fusion. Per Saxton's calculations, the old, obsolete Death Star I needed about five to ten times the continuous output of the Sun in order to charge up for a full powered shot once a day, with each shot releasing energy equivalent to the complete annihilation of 3.8x10^21kg mass.
If we assume that only Sol-like stars (mass 1.9x10^30 kg) are used for fuel and annihilated completely with no conversion losses, one star would provide enough energy for 5 billion Death Star shots – enough to conceivably wipe out every planet in the galaxy. However, this weapon has to consume an entire star with every firing, so that's right out. From the weapon's effects, I will hazard a guess that it's focusing the star's plasma into narrow torch-beams and then somehow firing them off through hyperspace, which would probably consume a small fraction of the energy needed to otherwise power a big fricking planet-killing laser-in-name-only. We could probably call the Ultimate Weapon the galaxy's biggest particle accelerator and not be too far off the mark.
Can I stop to comment on how utterly ludicrous Star Wars construction technology is? If the hologram was done to scale with the Death Star II, then the Ultimate Weapon would have had a diameter of at least 5,000 kilometers – roughly the size of our Moon. But I'm sure we'll have a far more precise definition of its diameter when the movie comes out on Blu-Ray.
Never mind the containment technology that would be needed to store an entire yellow dwarf's worth of mass inside of a planet – without turning said planet into a black hole.
So far, so good.
Now on to some real problems with the film's scope. The first firing of the Ultimate Weapon wiped out the capital of the New Republic, which looked a lot like Coruscant with a few moons. Which would have been fine – except that the destruction was visible from the Resistance base's planet. Given the way light travels, that means that both the capital of the New Republic and the Resistance base would have to be in the same system – in close orbits, no less – and that kind of defeats the entire purpose of having a secret base, or any sort of plausible deniability on the part of the Republic for supporting the Resistance. Or, for that matter, makes you wonder why they didn't just wipe out the entire system given the multi-target ability of the Ultimate Weapon.
Until just now, I'd avoided looking at any sort of spoilers including Wookieepedia. This, however, was just too jarring, so I looked it up. The capital is supposed to be “Hosnian Prime”, and the Resistance base is “D'Qar”. The former is in the Core, and the latter in the Outer Rim. The problem should be immediately obvious – it would take tens of thousands of years for the light from the Core to reach the Rim, and no amount of hyperspace shenanigans can really fix that.
Let's segue from physics into galactic politics now.
The fall of the Empire was clearly far more messy than it was portrayed in the old EU. Since it appears that intense fighting went on for years after Endor, it's probably a safe guess to say that the Rebellion managed to gain enough support post-Endor to fight the Imperial remnants to a stalemate and establish a New Republic within their secured territory. However, the Rebellion never actually went away with the creation of the NR, unlike the EU; it lived on inside Imperial territory as the Resistance, and despite official ties being denied between the two groups, it seems to be an open secret that the Republic funds the Resistance.
This explanation would account for the fact that the Resistance operates out of hidden bases in the Outer Rim – which is nominally under the control of the First Order. It also explains why their “fleet” consisted of X-wings and bombers, since a small underground movement would not be able to support heavy fleet assets.
(I'm not sure I buy the explanation offered on Wookieepedia for the lack of a proper fleet being its destruction by Starkiller Base in orbit of Hosnian Prime – the galaxy is a big place, and while it's possible that the main Fleet facilities were located there, it would be absolutely idiotic for the entire fleet to just be sitting there...)
My kids, 5 and 4 now, both watched it and were mostly riveted throughout. BB-8 definitely achieved its role of comic relief and cracked them up multiple times, and they both had a big “wow” moment when R2 finally appeared.
But first, let me get something off my chest:
THEY KILLED HAN! YOU BASTARDS!
Ahem.
Started off thinking Jakku was Tatooine. I suppose this is a rather understandable mistake, given that literally the only difference between them was the number of suns. Jakku is literally a stand-in desert wasteland planet, continuing with the old Star Wars trope of one-climate planets.
Still have no idea who the old guy was supposed to be at the beginning, other than somebody who was in the Rebellion back during the OT.
From the trailers, I wasn't sure what Fin was – I thought he might have been dressed as a stormtrooper in disguise. As soon as I saw the trooper hesitating in the beginning it started to make more sense. It was a rather convenient—almost to the point of being contrived—plot point that Fin just happened to break Poe out when he did. Also left me seriously wondering about the First Order's internal security standards when a fresh-out-of-training trooper can just waltz into the prisoner block, set a high-level prisoner free, and then bluff his way all the way to the hangar bay. Clearly their standards of recruiting have dropped since the Emperor died.
The old Star Destroyers crashed on the planet were a nice touch. Really helps to show the scale of the Galactic Civil War. We're pretty used to modern day shipwrecks getting cleaned up quickly; this is more reminiscent of the age of sail, when wrecks literally would sit on the rocks until they broke up. Maybe the Aral Sea would be a more appropriate modern analogy. I'm guessing that it's not worth salvaging the wrecks from backwaters like Jakku compared to more important core worlds.
Had a sneaking suspicion that the old “pile of junk” they stole was the Falcon, and was glad to be proven correct. The banter about the modifications really brought back the OT feel - the Falcon is practically as much of a character as anyone in the OT, as the characters struggle to keep her running.
The eventual big reveal – of Kylo Ren being Han and Leia's son Ben – wasn't as much of a surprise to me as I feel like they were trying to make it out to be. It was more or less a Cliffs Notes version of the Darth Caedus (ick) plotline from the post-NJO books, swapping Han for Mara Jade and cutting out all the pointless subterfuge. They really managed to capture every single bad trait from Jacen's characterization from the NJO onward, then turned it up to 11. He comes across as a whiny, heartless emo bitch who makes AoTC/RoTS Anakin look like a tragic character, and that's quite the accomplishment. The boy literally has no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Bravo, writers, he is a cardboard cutout.
I had a feeling they were going to kill off Han when Leia sent him off to try and turn Jacen Kylo Ben back. Not telegraphed. At all.
As for the big bad, I found Supreme Leader Snoke far less intimidating than Palpatine. Sure, he's got as much of an overcompensation problem as ol' Palpy did, what with the massive holograms and all, but he never said no to Jacen Kylo. The general (who? His name wasn't really clear either) was also clearly exasperated with Jacen Kylo's faulty instincts hampering their efforts at every level. I can only wonder what Snoke sees in him – useful distraction while seeking a real prize, perhaps?
On to the fun part: technology.
Let's start off with the Ultimate Weapon. (Since they never referred to it once as anything but “the Weapon” this is what I'm dubbing it for now.) It's some sort of “hyperspace cannon” which sucks up the entire mass of a star, somehow concentrates it into multiple independently targetable beams, and then shoots the whole thing through hyperspace – yet strangely still visible to the naked eye – in a giant red beam that obliterates everything in its path.
Somehow, for all its massive bulk, it still fails to be as intimidating as the first Death Star. Aside from the whole oops-there's-a-tiny-yet-devastating thermal exhaust port flaw, if the Death Star showed up in your system and you didn't have (a) the plans and (b) Force-sensitive fighter pilots handy, you were screwed.
In contrast, the Ultimate Weapon just fires out of the blue, so the poor targets never really realize what's about to hit them until it's too late. Fat lot of good that extra planetary girth does you for intimidation when they never even see it coming. Its impenetrable shields can be breached by the simple yet nearly suicidal act of jumping through them in hyperspace – why didn't anyone else ever think of doing so in the entire pre-retcon history of Star Wars? – and all one needs to take it down is a few bumbling characters winging a plan with a pack full of thermal detonators on the word of a former stormtrooper who happened to be stationed in sanitation there. My, how the Resistance has fallen from the elite Rebel commando teams of yesteryear.
Well, at least the First Order remembered to clear all indigenous lifeforms off the planet before they turned it into a superweapon. At least they remembered that from Endor.
Moving onto the fun part: calculations. The Ultimate Weapon is fueled by literally sucking up the entire goddamned mass of a main sequence star. What it does with that mass is unknown, but has something to do with technobabble that requires a highly vulnerable harmonic stabilizer in order to not spontaneously revert back to a stellar state.
Whatever it's doing, it can't just be harvesting the energy produced by fusion. Per Saxton's calculations, the old, obsolete Death Star I needed about five to ten times the continuous output of the Sun in order to charge up for a full powered shot once a day, with each shot releasing energy equivalent to the complete annihilation of 3.8x10^21kg mass.
If we assume that only Sol-like stars (mass 1.9x10^30 kg) are used for fuel and annihilated completely with no conversion losses, one star would provide enough energy for 5 billion Death Star shots – enough to conceivably wipe out every planet in the galaxy. However, this weapon has to consume an entire star with every firing, so that's right out. From the weapon's effects, I will hazard a guess that it's focusing the star's plasma into narrow torch-beams and then somehow firing them off through hyperspace, which would probably consume a small fraction of the energy needed to otherwise power a big fricking planet-killing laser-in-name-only. We could probably call the Ultimate Weapon the galaxy's biggest particle accelerator and not be too far off the mark.
Can I stop to comment on how utterly ludicrous Star Wars construction technology is? If the hologram was done to scale with the Death Star II, then the Ultimate Weapon would have had a diameter of at least 5,000 kilometers – roughly the size of our Moon. But I'm sure we'll have a far more precise definition of its diameter when the movie comes out on Blu-Ray.
Never mind the containment technology that would be needed to store an entire yellow dwarf's worth of mass inside of a planet – without turning said planet into a black hole.
So far, so good.
Now on to some real problems with the film's scope. The first firing of the Ultimate Weapon wiped out the capital of the New Republic, which looked a lot like Coruscant with a few moons. Which would have been fine – except that the destruction was visible from the Resistance base's planet. Given the way light travels, that means that both the capital of the New Republic and the Resistance base would have to be in the same system – in close orbits, no less – and that kind of defeats the entire purpose of having a secret base, or any sort of plausible deniability on the part of the Republic for supporting the Resistance. Or, for that matter, makes you wonder why they didn't just wipe out the entire system given the multi-target ability of the Ultimate Weapon.
Until just now, I'd avoided looking at any sort of spoilers including Wookieepedia. This, however, was just too jarring, so I looked it up. The capital is supposed to be “Hosnian Prime”, and the Resistance base is “D'Qar”. The former is in the Core, and the latter in the Outer Rim. The problem should be immediately obvious – it would take tens of thousands of years for the light from the Core to reach the Rim, and no amount of hyperspace shenanigans can really fix that.
Let's segue from physics into galactic politics now.
The fall of the Empire was clearly far more messy than it was portrayed in the old EU. Since it appears that intense fighting went on for years after Endor, it's probably a safe guess to say that the Rebellion managed to gain enough support post-Endor to fight the Imperial remnants to a stalemate and establish a New Republic within their secured territory. However, the Rebellion never actually went away with the creation of the NR, unlike the EU; it lived on inside Imperial territory as the Resistance, and despite official ties being denied between the two groups, it seems to be an open secret that the Republic funds the Resistance.
This explanation would account for the fact that the Resistance operates out of hidden bases in the Outer Rim – which is nominally under the control of the First Order. It also explains why their “fleet” consisted of X-wings and bombers, since a small underground movement would not be able to support heavy fleet assets.
(I'm not sure I buy the explanation offered on Wookieepedia for the lack of a proper fleet being its destruction by Starkiller Base in orbit of Hosnian Prime – the galaxy is a big place, and while it's possible that the main Fleet facilities were located there, it would be absolutely idiotic for the entire fleet to just be sitting there...)