Went to see Star Wars: The Force Awakens

[47of74]

It was so much better than the prequels.

And Thank God Jar-Jar was no where to be seen.

[LonePirate]

1. I saw it and wished there had been a SW 6.5

So much happened between ROTJ and TFA that this movie simply could not do the timeline any justice.

[phantom power]

12. I agree, although my theory is they're going to do some flashbacks in 8.

But I felt it took something away from the scene where Han Solo is killed by his kid. I just had no emotional context for that.

[Tanuki]

2. Question: I saw the original trilogy but never saw any of the 3 prequels.

I want to see The Force Awakens, but will I have missed out on too much back story?

[47of74]

3. Actually I don't think so.

I don't think you will have missed out on too much of the back story if you go see Episode VII without seeing the prequels. Beyond mentioning Anakin/Vader there really isn't any mention of any of the stories or characters from the prequels.

That said I think having seen the prequels may raise one's appreciation for the work JJ and crew did on Episode VII.

[Tanuki]

4. Thanks! I will go ahead and see the new film, and maybe take a look at the IMDB summaries

of the prequels before I go.

[OrwellwasRight]

5. Agree 100%

Movie was entertaining and impressive. Light years better than the prequels.

[47of74]

11. When they revealed Luke Skywalker....

....I had a holy shit I actually lived long enough to see this moment.

[SheilaT]

6. I finally saw it, and for me it

is one of the most laughably bad s-f movies ever. Right up there with "2001, A Space Odyssey".

A full three fourths of the screen time is taken up with various battles/fights. After a while it gets quite boring. There are HUGE plot flaws and plot lapses. How exactly is it that the scavenger can fly a spaceship? All she's done since her parents left her behind is eke out a bare living scavenging. So okay, maybe she'd learn a little bit about the technology, but that she can fly? Really? Plus, the ship hasn't been flown in YEARS and it starts right up? Plus, when did the Millennial Falcon become a huge freighter? And when it keeps on skimming the surface I'm to believe that there's NO damage of any significant sort? Can I sell you a bridge?

The idea that Han Solo and Princess Leia had a child threw me. Woah! I somehow didn't see that coming. But as I last watched episode 6 a good thirty years ago, maybe I've just forgotten a lot.

Their kid, by the way, looked absolutely nothing like either one of them, and I was honestly confused that Darth Vader was his grandfather, although someone else pointed out that since P. Leia was Luke Skywalker's sister, and since Luke's father was famously Darth Vader, I'd just forgotten the connection. But why should I believe the two of them had the same father? Okay, I'll give you that one.

Han Solo dies! Murdered by his own son. Oh, the perfidy of ungrateful offspring!

Am I the only person bothered by the relatively primitive technology of the starships?

Oh, and if you've never seen the fabulous Irish move "Grabbers" please go straight to Netlix and get the DVD. It's a delight of a movie, and the monsters on the Falcon are completely stolen from that movie!

[Orrex]

7. Could you name a "good" science fiction movie, for comparison?

Grabbers was ok, at least for the parts through which I was able to stay awake. Strikes me as more of a horror comedy than a science fiction film anyway.

2001 is more or less unanimously identified as the cinematic pinnacle of the genre, even 4+ decades later. Interesting that you would identify it as "laughably bad."

You are welcome to your opinion, of course, but I suspect that you might be pursuing an aesthetic that is alien to most fans of the genre.

[SheilaT]

8. For my money the best and most purely science-fictional movie

ever was Twelve Monkeys. It is completely faithful to its premise: sending someone back in time to try to stop the release of a virus which will kill off most of the world's population. Bruce Willis is totally amazing as the confused time traveler. Brad Pitt plays crazy in a wonderfully believable way. Christopher Plummer does go a bit over the top as a villain, but even that works. And the rest of the cast never stray from their characters.

Perhaps because I did not see 2001 when it first came out, even though I'm more than old enough, I really saw the flaws in it a decade or so later. In the opening sequence the apes are so obviously men in gorilla suits, that it's painful to watch. You can almost tell that Pan Am is going to go out of business because of the low load factors on the Moon Shuttle. The third part was simply boring, and HAL wasn't very believable to me. I had already read the story that is the original idea for it, "The Sentinel" by Arthur C. Clarke, and I recommend it highly. Excellent story.

I got my start reading science fiction as a young child, and while a lot of the "golden age" writing is not very good by today's standards, it was what brought me into the genre. And there are a lot of the novels from that era that are just begging to be turned into films, in my opinion, and I just don't understand why Hollywood, or at least the Syfy Channel hasn't done so. For instance, I think that the Isaac Asimov novel The End of Eternity would make a great movie, done with reasonable faithfulness to the book.

But back to the recent Star Wars. I kept on expecting a plot, some sort of story to emerge, and after 45 minutes I gave up, because it was just one fight scene after another. Oh, and at the end, when the girl (the scavenger, I can't recall her name she made so little impression as an individual) is laser sword fighting with whatsisname, the young villain, every time she does knock him down she doesn't move in for the kill. Of course, the makers wanted to prolong that flight scene, and so then they had the earthquake separate them. Oh, and there are two more movies to be made, that's right, and while it's okay to kill of Han Solo, they can't kill off the next generation who need more movies of their own.

And yes, Grabbers was a horror comedy, which isn't going to work for everyone. What I liked the very best about that movie is that when the characters were supposed to be drunk, they behaved like real drunk people actually do. I liked that.

[Orrex]

9. You must understand that your post has the distinct air of hipsterism

Given your fondness for golden age scifi, I'm surprised that the appeal of space opera is lost on you.

Twelve Monkeys was indeed excellent, and I've seen it many times. Probably the most interesting exploration of time travel thus far committed to film.

Your complaints about 2001 are rather pedestrian, though, on par with the petty but perennial complaint that explosions don't make noise in space. At the time of the film, the ape costumes were the pinnacle of makeup technology, and it's worth bearing that in mind. The simulation of zero-G is at least as good as any attempt since then, including Apollo 13 where they actually filmed scenes aboard a vomit comet.

I've read The Sentinel, and it's among Clarke's best works. Vastly superior to his novelization of the film, by the way.

[SheilaT]

10. The Golden Age

WAS the age of space opera. It's what I grew up on.

I am the least hipser-ish person you could ever meet.

My complaints about the Star Wars movie is that it's almost totally fight sequences, and has plot flaws you could drop a black hole into and never notice.

And if you're thinking I don't like modern science fiction, you're wrong. I will admit that fantasy and the entire sword and sorcery thing is totally lost to me, and I wish those genres were not subsumed into science fiction.

I like just about everything Robert Charles Wilson has written, as well as Jack McDevitt. I have been a huge fan of Harry Turtledove, but I've given up on him after his last two novels. Connie Willis. John Barnes. Ben Winter's The Last Policeman trilogy. He has a new one coming out Underground Airlines that's coming out in July and I can hardly wait to read it.

I will confess to an inordinate fondness for time travel and alternate history. Which reminds me, I really liked The Butterfly Effect, thought that was extremely well done.

Please, please, don't accuse me of hipsterism.

[GaYellowDawg]

13. Hi!

I think you would like S.M. Stirling's Drama series for alternate history. I would also recommend Stirling's stand alone Peshawar Lancers to you. And perhaps The Rivers of War by Eric Flint. You might also enjoy the Old Man's War series by John Scalzi. If you like time travel, it doesn't get much better than the Nantucket trilogy by Stirling.

[SheilaT]

14. I can only take a little bit of

S.M. Stirling. I did like "Dies the Fire", thought it well done for the most part, but when it started going off into essentially medieval fantasy, he lost me. I actually know Steve and he's a great guy, so I feel a bit bad about not liking his books better.

I tend to have a very low tolerance for series books in the first place. Likewise, I liked "Island in the Sea of Time" and couldn't get very far in the second one. And he's not really writing alternate history, to quibble here a bit, but having some major catastrophe happen and then go from there. Real alternate history says, "What if some specific thing had happened differently in the past? What would our world be like now?"

Again, Harry Turtledove is a master of alternate history, or has been up until recently. I found his latest, "Joe Steele" to be unreadable, and gave up after about fifty or so pages. But much of his earlier works are really good.

I read "1632", but again, for me an open-ended series almost never works. Or even a closed one.

Another writer I really like these days is James Van Pelt. He mostly writes short stories and has four collections out. Also two stand-alone novels, both of which are YA.

"Time and Again" and "From Time to Time" by Jack Finney are two of the very best time travel novels ever written. For years, when in conversation with someone who said they didn't like science fiction, I'd recommend "Time and Again", and invariably the people who read it said they really liked it, and it changed their mind about s-f.

While I read a fair amount of s-f, it's by no means the bulk of my reading. About half of everything I read is non-fiction, almost any subject you could name, and lots of mainstream novels. Also thrillers and mysteries. Perhaps that's why I'm critical and unforgiving of the flaws I see in s-f. Then again, you probably never want to go to a movie with me, because I start in on all the flaws I perceive as soon as I leave the theater.

The real problem with s-f movies, in my opinion is two-fold. First is that the people making them absolutely know how to make movies (while I wouldn't have a clue where to start, were I to get it into my I head I wanted to make a movie), but know very little about real science fiction. They think it *is* the movies, and they're missing a body of literature that goes back more than a century. The other problem is the reliance on special effects almost to the complete exclusion of a plot -- my problem with the new Star Wars movie in a nutshell. Too bad, because modern fx is truly wonderful. One reason I'd love to see "The End of Eternity" by Isaac Asimov made into a movie is that now we have the special effects to pull off his descriptions of the different centuries. Plus, it has a pretty decent plot.

In any case, thanks for reading through this old thread and responding to me.