Re: Star Wars
In reply to dparasol (msg # 14):
I can excuse stuff like that. If you consider the Force as some kind of extra-sentient entity, it knows what its students need to grow. The Force needed someone to pull off that one-of-a-kind shot...and Luke was the only one willing to listen to it instead of a targeting computer (that was apparently never calibrated for a shot to make a 90deg turn just before the target, oddly enough. See, the thing that always bothered me about the Death Star attack run was why fly down the trench? Locate the port and attack from overhead...a diving target is harder to lock onto, anyway, because the angle of the barrel is constantly changing...you've got two axes you have to get just right to hit the target, instead of just one...and if you were diving at a port that opens down into the station, you wouldn't have had that 'just impacted on the surface' nonsense...a hit would have been a hit...)
But once Luke got that far, he had to overcome his preconceptions of what a Jedi should be, and develop some humility to learn properly. So, yeah...he had to struggle.
Now, Rey...her whole life has been a struggle. She's learned humility. She's been living on instinct (and potentially listening to The Force) since she was tiny. So, mentally and emotionally, she's ready to carry a burden which Luke had to be softened up to carry. I can forgive that.
The hyperspace ram maneuver is just one of an abundance of things about the sequels that I blame JJ Abrams for, because he did the same thing with his Star Trek movies...'this threat has gotta be bigger and badder than anything we've ever seen before...screw plausibility, I want the worst threat we can create!' So, in Star Trek, you get things like a mining ship that has somehow inexplicably developed enough military capabilities to lay waste to an entire battle-fleet of combat vessels with experienced crews aboard, or a secretly-built starship that is so much larger than anything else in its fleet that one wonders just how they managed to smuggle all the necessary parts for the superstructure out into the middle of nowhere, with nobody noticing, and starships with absolutely needless construction elements in them. In Star Wars, you get planets that somehow maintain their integrity and climate while being gutted and repurposed...weapons that can somehow siphon energy away from the sun that is the gravitational center of the star system, pull it in through the atmosphere without instantly igniting all the oxygen in the air and any flammable substances (like the trees) one the ground, and redirecting it into an energy-beam that fires from a single source, and then mysteriously splits at some point into multiple beams that wipe out entire star systems. I don't hate the story around it...but that makes parts of that story hard to accept. Had similar issues with Star Destroyers that somehow managed to harness the same level of energy for which the Empire had to build entire Death Stars, when a smaller, simpler kind of weapon (that ignites the atmosphere, instead of destroying the entire planet) would be just as effective and far more plausible.
All that said, I don't hate the stories around those points. I feel like there was a lot of good. Ep 7 mirroring Ep 4 makes sense to me because it echoes the cyclic nature of many of humanity's myths, where a threat is overcome by a hero or demigod or god, only to have another similar threat arise later and have to be handled again. They just flipped the script slightly and had an ideological successor do it, rather than the same hero. I do think they dropped the ball in not establishing a definite story arc for the entire trilogy from the off, which was one of the things that George Lucas definitely got right and why the original trilogy feels complete and unified, despite the fact that each episode had different writers and a different director overseeing it. Yes, the sequels were a bit of a mess, story-wise...part of that is due to Colin Treverow walking away (or being fired, depending on who tells the story), part of it is due to Carrie Fisher dying, and a lot of it is due to just having some vague direction in which to take the story and having different people piecing together the route along the way...it'd be like trying to find your way west in North America with partial maps from Lewis and Clark, Kit Carson, and the Donner Party. Yeah, you'd eventually get to the Pacific Ocean, but there would be a lot of gaps along the way. I like where they ended up...I don't think it was perfect, but I think it was fitting. I have some issues with the route, and a few of the detours...but overall, I enjoyed it, and it gave me a side of Star Wars that I have only explored in some role-playing games...where the hero grows disenchanted with his role and questions whether he's done more harm than good...where literally anybody can wind up becoming a hero, regardless of their upbringing or bloodline (aiming that one at Finn)...where the good guys literally lose almost everything and STILL manage to pull it all together when it counts.
Those plot points are what I love about the sequel trilogy...and I feel like anyone trying to retcon them is going to gut them and give a hollowed-out facsimile that lacks the heart of the first attempt.