Star Wars - [Insert Clever Title Here]

(I realize that the text size is tiny for some reason. I apologize for that - I'm trying to fix it as soon as possible.)

Hey everyone! I had spoken to many of my friends, family, and coworkers about the topic of today's post before finally realizing that I would need to make a post about it. Because really, how can I claim to have a blog about all sorts of nerdy topics without discussing my thoughts on the latest Star Wars movie?

Now, there are a lot of things to be said about the new movie. It broke new ground in a lot of ways, while also staying true to the characters and setting established by the previous six movies. (Some people would say "the previous five movies," but we'll allow Episode I to be considered, if only because Darth Maul was a badass. Also, Liam Neeson.) What I would like to do for this review, then, would be to discuss some of the specific things I liked about the movie, as well as a few of the specific things I didn't like as much.

I do want to mention, though, that overall, I greatly enjoyed The Force Awakens. I only got the chance to watch it once in theaters, but I would have happily gone to see it multiple, multiple times if I'd had the opportunity.

In case you couldn't already guess, there will likely be a ton of spoilers as we move forward. So if you haven't seen the movie yet for whatever reason (yeah, some people haven't seen it yet - they're out there), you should probably stop reading now. Also, I would like to point out that these are simply my opinions, and should be taken as such. Feel free to disagree with me!

So without any further ado...


Pro: The lightsaber fight

One of my biggest complaints about Episodes I, II, and III - a complaint that is shared by many people with whom I've spoken on the topic - was the lightsaber fights. (For now, let's ignore the complaints about characters, plot, and dialogue in the prequel trilogy, because otherwise, we'd be here until Episode VIII is released.) The choreography was always very well done for those fights - look at the Darth Maul/Qui-Gon/Obi-Wan fight in The Phantom Menace as an example, or the Anakin/Obi-Wan fight in Revenge of the Sith. But to me, those fights were always extraordinarily over-the-top. The Jedi involved would always flip and twirl and make about seventeen unnecessary movements for every one legitimate swing of the lightsaber at their opponents.

Exhibit A.

Also, this just in - I can use .gifs! So many possibilities.

Of course, looking at the original trilogy, we often see the opposite issue. While I understand that the special effects were not as good in the 1970s and 1980s, the lightsaber duels in Episodes IV, V, and VI could sometimes be bland affairs, with the two opponents just whacking away at one another until somebody lost. This wasn't always the case, either, but it tended to be a running theme with those duels.

So now we get to The Force Awakens, and we have a climactic lightsaber duel between Kylo Ren and Finn, which is then continued between Kylo Ren and Rey once Kylo incapacitates Finn. (It's really weird calling him just "Kylo," but I think it's better than calling him "Ren." So we're sticking with Kylo.) And in my opinion, this is the best lightsaber duel in the entire Star Wars saga, or at least in the top three. It struck a good middle ground - it was a largely story-driven fight like the majority of those seen in the original trilogy, while also being exciting and well-choreographed. Plus, it never felt over-the-top in terms of its choreography. And the other thing I enjoyed about that duel is that it demonstrated the characters' personalities very well, especially Kylo's. But more on that in a minute!

By the way, many of my above assertions apply to the special effects in the movie as well, I feel. Which I also thought to be a positive part of Episode VII.


Con: A New Hope 2.0

Probably my biggest issue with Episode VII was that, after watching it, it felt as if I had just seen Episode IV all over again, just reskinned. Droid with important information is lost on a desert planet after a stormtrooper attack and gets picked up by a local, who then flies away in the Millennium Falcon to bring the droid to the Rebellion/Resistance. The local, who is actually Force-sensitive and turns out to be more than they appeared at first, is assisted by an older companion, who was an important figure in the war of the previous trilogy. A few fights later, the protagonist's party meets up with the Rebellion/Resistance, who then take the fight to the Empire/First Order. The old sage is killed by the villain, who happens to be directly related to a few of the main characters. The movies culminate in the protagonist destroying the Empire/First Order base of operations/weapons platform, which was demonstrated to have destroyed at least one planet earlier in the movies. Plus, there's another mysterious villain who appears by hologram, and there's a scene at a bar.

And the aforementioned droids are awesome.

I realize that a) I left out a metric ton of differences between the movies, b) I'm oversimplifying significantly, and c) I'm not really mentioning that having callbacks to the original trilogy seems to be what J.J. Abrams was going for. But the similarities are hard to deny. And while I appreciated the callbacks, and I understand why they were done the way they were (I feel that they were done in order to help establish the new characters in the setting, while keeping things familiar and showing, perhaps, that history is doomed to repeat itself?), I felt that it was done just a little too much.


Pro: Kylo Ren's character

This will probably be the most controversial point of this whole post. People who have watched The Force Awakens seem to have one of two reactions toward Kylo Ren as a character - either they loved him and thought he was very well-acted and well-written, or they hated him and thought his character was terrible. I haven't really spoken with anyone who fell in the middle ground. Generally, there is a consensus that Kylo was established as an intimidating, fearsome villain in the beginning acts of the film, but once he removed the helmet, all pretenses were lost and he became an emotional trainwreck.

If you haven't seen it yet, please go look up Emo

Kylo Ren on Twitter.

But really, I liked Kylo Ren for that exact reason. I think that some people were disappointed because they were expecting Darth Vader 2.0, and instead they got Anakin. I felt that his character was very well thought-out and fleshed out, and you could constantly see the inner turmoil that defined Kylo's actions throughout the movie. You see him as an intimidating badass, but you also see him as a child on a temper tantrum. You see the nigh-successful attempts to emulate Vader, but you also see his very real flaws. I also felt, as I somewhat mentioned earlier, that the lightsaber duel was an excellent insight into his character. He fought relatively skillfully for someone whose training was cut short (and someone who just took a bowcaster shot to the torso and walked it off), but you could actually see the rage and inner conflict in Kylo as he attacked Finn and Rey. 

Kylo Ren was absolutely one of my favorite new characters in The Force Awakens, and I'm very interested to see how his character continues to develop over the course of the next two movies.

Con: The comedy

Not much to say here, really, since my argument is essentially the same as my earlier statements about similarities between Episode IV and Episode VII. Basically, I really enjoyed the comedy that was included in The Force Awakens - it was funny without being goofy (looking at you, Jar Jar), and it rarely felt forced. That being said, I felt that there was just slightly too much comedy added into the movie, especially in the first half. It's a pretty nitpick-y complaint, but I guess I expect a pretty serious tone when I go into a Star Wars movie, and while The Force Awakens was certainly a serious movie, I felt that the comedy was slightly overdone.

Pro: This guy

'Nuff said.

Con: Not enough of this gal

Also 'nuff said.

But yeah, that's most of what I had to say on the topic. There were other high points and low points in The Force Awakens, but these were the major ones that I wanted to discuss. Like I said before, I thought that overall, the movie was excellent, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. In fact, most of my complaints were simply "this was done very well, but they went too far with it." Which is not a very bad complaint at all, I feel.

That's about that! See you all next week!

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