Gethsemani said:
. The EU was so obsessed with the Empire that it had the clone of the Emperor return with a interstellar cannon that could destroy planets.
As opposed to the interstellar cannon that could destroy entire systems that we got in TFA?
The state of the Empire in the EU actually made sense. 5 years after the battle of Endor the Empire's fragments collectively are more powerful then the New Republic, with the New Republic only gaining ground due to the Imperial Civil War between different Moffs and Admirals. It took 15 years after the Battle of Endor for both the New Republic to get into a strong enough position to make a peace treaty and for the Imperial Admiralty to purge the warlords who would oppose such a peace to occur. 15 years and a peace treaty. That makes sense.
You know what happened in canon? 1 year after the Battle of Endor the Empire surrendered. Not a peace treaty, not a cease fire, surrendered. The only reason the Imperial Remnant in canon is a Republic puppet state instead of being annexed was because the New Republic didn't have the manpower to occupy the worlds loyal to the Empire. 1 year, 1 fucking year, after most of the Rebel fleet was annihilated and should have, with only 1 year to recover, been smashed to pieces at Jakku just from sheer numbers. And then the First Order was formed when the Imperial Navy realised "wait a minute, we've got then outgunned and outnumbered, that's bullshit" and decided to take off for uncharted space because I guess someone at Disney is a Battletech fan who likes the Clans.
Yes. A supercharged Galaxy Gun built by a nation so small most didn't believe it even existed had said Galaxy Gun taken down by a dozen pilots because its weakness was not only the same as its two predecessors but its location was not even a secret.
Being impulsive and acting rashly was always the Luke thing to do.
And that was always as a means to the ends of doing the right thing. It would have actually made sense if Luke had taken the New Jedi Order with him to train them away from the influence of the Republic and the Imperial Remnant, but instead he just ran away in a move completely out of character with how he was portrayed in the original trilogy.
You realize that the movie makes it explicit that Han left because he couldn't be near Leia after Ben became Kylo, right? 'nuff said.
Which is fucking bullshit as an in-universe explanation and exists only to justify a general who had gotten far beyond the point of returning to crime to do just that only to give reason for why he and Chewie where hunting for the Falcon, a ship they never would have lost to begin with and had countless ways of justifying the two being on Jakku with the ship if the writers had actually cared.
That we see on screen. We don't know the full strength of the Resistance, only that its' top leadership is being threatened by Starkiller base and that their deaths would be the end of the Resistance. The movie also implies that no one really believes the First Order to be an actual threat, hence why the Resistance operates on a shoestring.
You're telling me that despite explicitly having official support from The Republic they are so lacking in resources and manpower that their entire starfleet is explicitly less then two dozen outdated starfighters, something Leia's own personal fortune alone would have been more then enough to buy multiple times over?
Even if it was just her own personal band of mercenaries with no other support they'd still be smaller then one could justify and would be so small the First Order wouldn't even recognise them as anything more then another irrelevant band of pirates with delusions of grandeur who don't even have a proper ship. The Ghost was more of a threat then The Resistance.
You mean like in A New Hope, when a lesser amount of fighters managed to take down a moon-sized battle station that knew they were coming? TFA at least provides the excuse of a surprise attack and a ground party that enables the fighters to get a shot.
A New Hope was also a hail mary throw by the Rebel Alliance where they threw every fighter and bomber they had into a hopeless last stand that had a 95% mortality rate after a million to one shot by a force sensitive took down an otherwise indestructible battle station.
Rogue One retconned this into being every fighter and bomber they had after their raid on the outpost the Death Star was designed at and the Battle of Scarif, at which most of the Rebel fleet that wasn't just fighter sized craft where destroyed and most of the rest damaged. And even that changed the critical design flaw as being an intentional part of the design for such an attack.
TFA had an even larger battle station had the literal same design flaw that was exploited in the same way but with an even smaller force against a more heavily defended station. One which should have known they where coming just by virtue of the shield being down (and the fact Phasma was willing to take it down is bullshit, as is the fact she alone could instead of it requiring multiple locations to independently do it together).
De-masked Ren's lack of menace is arguably plot point, but don't let that stop you.
It's a weak plot point. He shouldn't have taken his mask off until his confrontation with Han. In fact him being a pretty boy emo ***** in that one scene alone would have worked. Hell remove the interrogation scene and have the lightsaber battle have the two characters change their place in the script for that scene and he's actually be a decent villain instead of the laughing stock he is.
You what now? It is about as complete as Luke's was in ANH.
No it isn't. Luke didn't know shit about how to use the force, he didn't know shit about how to fight, he didn't even know how to properly use a blaster. All he had going for him was that he was a good pilot and was starting to learn the ways of the force.
Ray was already a good fighter by the start of the movie, she was an ace fighter pilot equivalent before ever setting foot in a cockpit, and 5 minutes after learning of the existence of the force she's already using it at the same level that a master would in previous movies, and this culminated in her defeating the villain of the movie in their head of fight. She has nowhere left to go. She knows how to use the force as well as masters do already, she already is a better fighter then her nemesis, she's already an ace fighter pilot, to be blunt there's a reason why those who understand how characters are supposed to be made called her a Mary Sue and those who don't understand that a female character who's perfect is a bad character pretended that fact isn't true.
He tried something new, lost the soul of his old work and burned miserably in the process. TFA might be threading water and revisiting old beats in some respects (though the extent of this is way exaggerated by grumpy internet denizens), but at least it understood what made ANH a good movie, unlike Episode I which couldn't decide what kind of movie it wanted to be or what its' focus was. And that was the best of the prequels.
If TFA understood what made ANH a good movie then why the hell did it gut all that stuff out and only leave what didn't work well in it? Why didn't scenes logically flow from one to the next? Why did characters have no consistency to them (like a man who wanted to run away from the fight because he doesn't want to kill anyone then in the next scene gun down unarmed deck hands who posed no threat to him, or the poor starving scavenger who had enough time to learn how to maintain ships she never had reason to work on, pilot things she never touched or languages of species she's never met)? Why wasn't the villain's goal and motivation made clear, or hell even what their position was given in ANH we at least knew the Empire was large and in charge while the Rebels where a small group resisting them. Can't even pretend anything on screen explains the relationship between the Republic, the Resistance and the New Order. I only even know the Imperial Remnant exists because of other sources, and that's not even getting started on the fact that's what you need to understand the totality of the relationship the powers have to each other is, to say nothing of the villain's motivations.
I've got to say though that I am amused by how much shit you give TFA when most of the criticism comes from a lacking understanding of the actual plot and the remaining is shitting over it for things it did that ANH also did. What's good for the goose and all that.
Actually the more one thinks about the plot of TFA the less sense the whole damn thing makes and the more clear it is no one's actions make any sense at all and YouTubers like RedLetterMedia and E;R put more thought into their analysis of the movie then the writers did into the script. Though in all fairness I think Disney corporate likely had a heavy hand in how bland and bad the movie's story was. I'm 90% sure the movie was doomed to be shit because of that alone and whether it was the case or not doesn't change the fact it was of comparable quality to the prequels no matter how shiny the special effects used to distract people from that fact where. As someone who does not care about the quality of effects that stuff never works to distract me from what I'm really there for.