Star Wars: The Force Awakens

[scriptweaver]

Spoiler

I would've liked the movie more if the soundtrack was more, variant I suppose? It feels like the Force theme played WAY too many times throughout that movie, Jesus, it's supposed to be saved for the REALLY important movies.

My biggest gripe was the antagonists... Kylo was just so, puny. Pathetic. A weakling. He and the First Order were a bunch of knock offs of the greatness that was the Empire. The Empire put fear because they may have been space nazis, but they were fearsome, outside of their shooting, by never losing their grip. Never losing control. The only reason the Rebel Alliance won was because they hit the Empire hard and fast (movie canon) without letting a massive war drag on. First Order, bunch of people with a stupid idea (Starkiller Base AKA The Death Planet) who had to scream everything.

And the final fight with Kylo... GOD FREAKING DARN IT THAT WAS BAD. Kylo should've finished that fight a lot quicker and killed Rey and Finn, or Rey should've killed him. Kylo should not have lived thanks to dues ex machina. Seriously. There's no logical way he could've survived the fight, but they wouldn't have had the planet just open up to conveniently spare him if he couldn't get off the planet before being vaproized by the fact it turned into a star.

Finn was great though. Silver lining. Love him. I was like "Black Stormtrooper protagonist Jedi? That's stupid." But dude, was so cool.

*SPOILERS*

I love the fact you brought up dues ex machina. Its a point I love to bring up around friends, but is not a smart move to bring up around more dedicated fans (their reasoning is that dues ex machina has always existed in star wars through the force).

But...lets examine this for a second. Just for the heck of it ya know?

So most of us can agree when we saw the original Indiana Jones, we loved it and all it entailed right? so when we watched crystal skull, we're told it does the same deus ex machina as the originals, so then why can we detect how bad it is in comparison to the original? well, most ppl like to say that most films had a free pass on deus ex machina back then because it was a different time as well as the fact theres nostalgia for some of us.

Now while that may be true to an extent, I'd like to call out what I think is really going on. lets look at younger audiences whom saw the prequels before the original trilogy, yet still sided with the original trilogy in the end. Obviously they'd have less nostalgia for the original considering the prequels popped their cherry rather than the original trilogy so the nostalgia factor seems to have no ground really. If anything this idea contradicts the defense mentioned earlier because if anything, the prequels had MORE deus ex machina going on than the original with the whole "blinding shroud of the dark side" silliness going on and the like. (in other words, the free pass of deus ex machina because of "that era" is of folly considering a younger generation can still smell a bad movie when the progeny of a franchise is introduced to them before the forefathers)

a bad movie is a bad movie and no matter how much time passes, you can't hide a bad movies...well bad qualities. If anything, their bad qualities are shown more blatantly as time passes.

Now am I saying eps 7 is bad? not necessarily, in fact I already gave my pros in the previous post, anyway, back on topic.

so now we're back to the original question. why is it we can tell the bad qualities of a remake in comparison to its father? we've already declared it can't be nostalgia or a free pass of time period, so what is it? It's the amount of deus ex machina being used and to what extent.

Think about it, in the original Indiana Jones film, one of the most crazy deus ex machinas is indy running from a boulder right? outside of that, it'd take you a while to think of the others that may be classified as deus ex machina. Now lets look at its child, crystal skull, as of now I can easily think of two major scenes, the nuclear explosion (he should've died, blah blah blah) and the cannibalistic red ants (even though red ants are actually mostly harmless and much smaller than what they were portrayed as). Now why is it that I can easily think of more obvious red flag deus ex machina moments in the crystal skull film rather than in Ark film? 

It's because one uses deus ex machina much more sparingly and with much more balance of what'd be possible to get away with. They kept the random helpful magic and unrealistic moments to a minimum. I think you know what I'm getting at by now don't you?

All of this can be applied when it comes to the original star wars trilogy and eps 7. Theres more random free uses of the force without proper training, theres all these coincidences that just happen to occur at the right moment to advance the plot, its all there and is all pretty obvious.

btw, heres the kicker, both original the Indiana Jones films and star wars films are made by the same one man, George Lucas.
This makes my Indy analogy that much stronger and useful when making these parallel connections.

The reason why we feel there's more deus ex machina in this new film is because there IS more in there than the original. It's a major flaw, but one that sadly can't be avoided, considering the new creators are more of  fans of the original than the original artist himself or his original team. It also makes total sense they'd make all the same mistakes as every post-twenty year sequel does. It's almost expected at this point. Am I ok with this? No, of course not, but its reality sadly and now that the EU has been annexed, it will ultimately fall into this "expired for its time" pattern all the other towering franchises are crashing into (like Indy and so on).

*SPOILERS*




oh my, I just sorta phased out for a moment and the words just appeared, I don't know what happened lol 
I guess your deus ex machina comment stroke a cord in me or somethin'

This simple response mutated into a fanboy ramble, so ignore it if you want. I'm keeping it here because this took like 30 mins to type. Sorry if this starts a debate or whatever. I guess I'm no different than the warring fanboy commenters now huh? Drat.

 

[Grey Star]

Actually no you brought up some valid points in a subtle way. You could've done away with the introduction to the idea, but I like it.

My view on your points:

Spoiler

I'll start with Raiders of the Lost Ark. The parts that make the deus ex machina work, at least in my muddled memory, is the presentation. The way the boulder rolls suggests that it's not moving fast enough to hurt Indy and is just rotating very rapidly. Despite breaking the laws of physics no one minds because it's presented just well enough to convince the audience "yeah this could happen." And the ending with the Ark makes sense due to a Biblical view, so if you grew up a good little Jew or Christian, you would remember that "anyone who touched the ark died." It made sense, Lucas didn't take a literal interpretation, he took an alternate view that ended with the same result. Death to anyone who touched. It's deus ex in two ways, there was nothing to suggest in universe that would happen, and the ark is from God himself. Though I don't think it's deus ex and just Lucas being clever.

Why this fails in Crystal is that surviving a nuke is non-believable. End of story. But it also fails with the aliens because MAGIC (the Ark, the Temple of Doom's heart wrenching priest, and the Holy Grail,) and God exist in Indy. ALIENS were not suggested, hinted at, or even seem believable in a world of MAGIC.

In a New Hope, some might consider Obi-Wan Kenobi's force ghost to be deus ex. It's arguable, but the important part is that it both qualifies while not. This is because Kenobi demonstrated that the Force was extremely powerful to those trained. There's an important three part build up. The first is the Catina scene. Obi-Wan slices off someone's arm and it acts like a regular sword wound. But when Obi-Wan gets killed by Vader, there's no body left behind, which is a subtle clue that something is up about his death. And then Obi-Wan gives his advice at the most critical moment, convincing Luke to use the force by showing him it's power of being able to cheat death.

Brief tangent about the prequels' problems: I am biased because I grew up with the prequels instead of the originals and as such I'm a lot more forgiving on acts of stupidity in the second three movies. But what's important is that they all follow a semi-consistent logic about the force. Untrained users are weak while trained users become god like. That's why Palpatine was able to fool the Jedi, having learned enough about the force. The Indy movies follow a similar internal logic, magic can and will kill any foolish mortal who uses it.

The Force Awakens fails in this regard by our previously discussed points of dues ex machina and there's no need to repeat them. What would've been better would explain Kylo's survival of his duel by something not so stupid as dumb luck, but make it obvious force manipulation from planets away or something. Though that's still lazy writing and dude should be dead. By breaking the internal logic of the series, that's why the sequel movies make hardcore fans shake their head in disbelief at the writing staff.

Important secondary note: When dealing with fantasy series that dosen't follow the logic of the real world, it's important to know that you can set a standard early on, but if you try to do new things as the plot demands, more attentive readers will pick up on it and cry foul. Like an invincible enemy the heroes having never defeated been killed by an alternate universe person or something.