Wait, there’s a new Star Wars movie?

James K

James is a government policy analyst, and lives in Wellington, New Zealand. His interests including wargaming, computer gaming (especially RPGs and strategy games), Dungeons & Dragons and scepticism. No part of any of his posts or comments should be construed as the position of any part of the New Zealand government, or indeed any agency he may be associated with.

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9 Responses

  1. You’d expect a First Order portrayal to be inconsistent or incomplete.Report

  2. Jaybird says:

    My favorite spoiler moment:

    When Kylo Ren removed his mask and revealed… a guy. Just a guy. (Well, my first thought was “they cast a young Snape.”) A good looking guy, maybe… but given that I didn’t know what in the heck I was expecting, the fact that it was not particularly notable what was under the mask was pretty cool.Report

    • Alan Scott in reply to Jaybird says:

      Yes. Kylo Ren was… well, not my favorite character, quite… but the character whose creation and portrayal I am most pleased with. He feels like an apology for everything that Lucas did wrong with the Skywalker Family force melodrama in RotJ and the prequel trilogy.Report

      • Jaybird in reply to Alan Scott says:

        I have fewer hard feelings toward Return of the Jedi than many (and those that I do have are not really aimed at the Skywalkers).

        I agree 100% with the rest of that, though.Report

      • Jaybird in reply to Alan Scott says:

        Oooh, one thing that they had him do that made me really, really interested?

        When he started talking about the pull of the Light Side. I find myself hoping that that particular metaphysic is going to be with us for the rest of the series. Though it does make me wonder what the ideal end goal would be for any given force sensitive… a balance between the two, where neither side pulls excessively?Report

        • Patrick in reply to Jaybird says:

          This was for a long time, basically the same as my theory.

          I had a whole mythology for how the Force worked; why the Jedi approach was limited, how and why the Jedi banned study of the Dark Side, why that decreased their actual power and eventually led to their downfall, why the Sith came about in the first place (beginning as a principled fork of the Jedi), and ultimately why Luke’s family destiny to restore balance to the Force means something other than just restoring the Jedi to an “all-Light side, all the time”. I had this whole thing worked out where the reason why Vader ultimately was able to resist the Emperor was due to him having been immersed in both the Dark and Light sides of the Force, that this was why Luke was able to also resist him as Luke used the Dark side to a degree in the fight with Vader, and that enhanced his abilities.

          Interestingly, it seems like J.J. ***may*** be doing something like this here, as Rey seems to learn most of her beginning Force skills by resisting Kylo; she’s toying with the Dark and the Light sides of the force in an utterly untrained way.

          It will be interesting to see if this is how the story plays out over the next two movies. I expect not; having the Force actually be united under a new Force order that uses both the Dark and the Light sides of the Force will kinda end the entire framework for generating Star Wars movies, and that’s not what you do when you paid $4 billion for ’em.Report

          • Jaybird in reply to Patrick says:

            One of the things I wondered as I watched the trailer for Marvel’s movie covering the Civil War storyline is the whole “wait, are vigilantes good or bad?” kinda thing and wondering how in the hell we’re going to watch that moral storyline play out.

            The whole “we are what we pretend to be” thing.

            I mean, we’re having a discussion about whether or not we should register guns with the government. We know that the “good guys” argue that we need a registry and the “bad guys” are the ones screaming about the rights of people who have guns…

            But the Civil War storyline was about registering people who were Living Guns with the government. If we live in a place where a guy can blow up a bus by looking at it wrong, doesn’t it make sense to say “maybe we should write his name down somewhere”?

            I mean, if you’re a fan of gun registries?

            And, suddenly, we’re talking about registering people with the government and that feels really, really creepy.

            In that same way, we grew up knowing that “The Light Side” was the good side… but now we’re wondering if it’s a case where “excess” is what needs to be overcome rather than “Darkness”.

            And there are some really, really creepy places you can go from there.

            We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.Report

      • Kim in reply to Alan Scott says:

        Kylo Ren either had really poor chemistry with Rei, or they missed about three beats that they should have had. You wanted there to be something between those characters.Report