…makes white guys the enemy of the future. Of course, it’s coming from people who think they’re the enemy of the past and present. But Christian Toto liked it.
I haven’t seen it yet.
[Sunday-morning update]
I’ve never been a huge Star Wars fan. It’s not really SF, or at least not hard SF. The effects were great for their time, but for my generation, 2001 is the touchstone.
Certainly not going to pay to watch it in the theater. Netflix will have it in six months, like the last one, which was nothing to write home about. Seriously, Han Solo gets offed by his own son ??? F___ that. And now the empire is white supremacists. Double f___ that. I’m too old to be entertained by being insulted.
About the only thing I watch on my satellite system anymore is sports, and it’s fast getting to the point where that’s not any better than streaming off the web. Contract is up next month. The networks and Hollywood are losing us by the thousands because of their virtue signaling and progressive bias. Will they learn before they go down like the NYT ?
There was an interesting article a few months ago about how China has become such an important market for Hollywood that the Golden Age Of SJW Movies may now be over. The Chinese just don’t go for it.
Either way, I have no desire to see this new movie. And the last one was basically Disney Princess In Space.
Rogue One is a hell of a lot better story than TFA.
I’ve heard the Empire as human supremacist trope before but it didn’t use to be quite this blatant.
As for the rest a lot is just Hollywood being Hollywood. It’s like doing “Karate Girl” after “Karate Kid” I,II,III. Every one of the heroes must be some minority (the exception being white women). We used to joke about that over here, that US movies increasingly looked like the old United Colors of Benetton ads. Well they do… Pathetic. Plot and motives used to matter.
I’ve still yet to watch this but at least it doesn’t sound like it’s the usual JJ Abrams “reboot” hack job. Not that I’m not used to it elsewhere as an anime fan. The Force Awakens is kind of like the Gundam SEED of the Star Wars franchise. Gary Stu/Mary Sue included (i.e. Kira “Jesus” Yamato). It’s the genius vagrant savant who knows astro-mechanics, piloting, and controls the mysterious “force” without any prior training at all.
I could self identify as a black Chinese woman, but I think I’ll continue to be a self reliant white guy that doesn’t care who hates me for no valid reason.
It’s an old story. Tyrants need an enemy and it looks like it’s our turn to play the part. That would be their biggest mistake.
The funny part is that almost everyone is mixed race at this point!
Rogue One?
Is the aging mentor this guy with wisps of white hair who speaks with a faint lisp, half his face missing, a veteran who had suffered unspeakable horrors that make him unable to tie his shoelaces but now goes around scolding people?
Is his protégé a perky woman having an odd nasal accent, with a goofball lunk of a husband, who gave strange names to her children like “Beta” and “Positron”, and a daughter who doesn’t seem to know the connection between walking in the snow with your dress shoes and getting them wrecked?
I watched the first two Star Wars movies way back when, but I never had the urge to see another one. I just never became a fanboy of the franchise.
And besides that, I’m simply not interested in giving my money to my enemies. Which Hollywood is.
In regards to that first article; The Empire has always been a “white supremacist organization” they’re Space Nazis. All the guys strutting around the Death Star wearing modified SS Uniforms in A New Hope, and the fact that they call their infantry “Stormtroopers”, should have been a bit of a clue.
It has been admitted by Lucas that Star Wars was supposed to represent the Vietnam war with the US as the Empire and the Vietnamese communists the rebels. SJW converged Disney has just finally realized a more accurate version of that vision. As entertainment, it’s really meant for children, which is why the in yer face anti-white male subtext is pretty loathsome.
Went to see it today. Star Wars is not ment to be a political statement, it is suppose to be a space opera. It is to entertain with a story about good Vs evil and the good guys are suppose to win. My expectations were well met. I was entertained, the cast acted well and they fit their parts. The writing was good and the cinematography was great. The movie meshed well with the ones already out there. Overall an enjoyable movie.
Funny thing is that the actors were so good and the characters fit the narrative that I didn’t even notice the “evil white man ” effect until I read this post. If you see identity politics in everything then you are part of the problem. Sometimes the person is female, black, Hispanic, Asian or martian just because that is who they are. Character matters more then skin color and in this case, despite what the writers said, that is what drove the movie. It wasn’t about minorities over throwing the white supremacists, it was about misfits fighting against evil.
“If you see identity politics in everything then you are part of the problem.”
Dude, the SJWs are putting identity politics into everything they control.
It’s what they do. It’s all they do.
And we’re supposed to pretend not to notice?
I’ll bet you’re one of the overwhelming majority of people who believe they aren’t effected by commercials even one little bit.
It’s Disney. I really doubt character mattered.
Who cares? It’s Felicity Jones!
Ok, here’s a nerd thing, and maybe something for the folks here. This is what bothers me about the recent Star Wars reboots:
Poor ship design
Let’s start with SW:TFA’s X-wing redesign. At least they put 4 round engines back in Rogue One. But then they have Kylo Ren’s command shuttle’s laughably long wings. And if that wasn’t bad enough; RO:ASWS has the Imperial cargo ship with its pointless 4 flappy wings.
As a kid, I figured the X-wing foils were closed for better atmospheric flight, and moved to X configuration to provide better moment arms for steering. The Imperial shuttle’s wings closed up to make it better to store on a ship, like carrier aircraft. But the new Star Wars flappy wings make the ships a complete pain in the ass for storing on a large carrier ship.
Sure, not every ship needs aspects that would make sense in an environment like Earth’s atmosphere. The Falcon certainly doesn’t look too aerodynamic. But they should make sense for purpose, and the Falcon doesn’t have a super long wing that protrudes out to make it harder to dock. I never understood the Falcon as a freighter, because it didn’t seem to have much room for storage, but for smuggling, ok.
I think the wing flapping is to get something moving on the screen for the excitement level, but to me; it just ruins the science part of the fiction.
Transformer ships is the Star Wars equivalent of Star Trek’s having 86 blinking lights per square inch on everything, and it’s not new to TFA. The Clone Wars cartoon had tons of ships with ridiculous reconfigurations on landing and takeoff.
Although I think the paramount example in RO was a ship that spread its wings to take off from a planet and as soon as it was in orbit, retracted them again.
Do not read further if you don’t want to see some things you can’t unsee, not that anything visual is involved. It’s all about the plot.
As my first impression, it was some of the worst concept work on a plot I’ve ever seen. Drunk monkeys would do better. Everyone here would do better.
The following is spoilerish:
Setting: The committee meeting of inept boobs working for Disney.
Given: You’re making a WW-II movie about how the Allies stole some extremely import Nazi secret. I’ll just pick jet engine secrets on the Messerschmidt 262, positing that an older blockbuster had used that as a plot point in a movie that didn’t totally suck.
A) Someone at Disney suggests that we got the Me-262 plans from Willy Messerschmitt’s daughter. That’s a pretty standard idea that would occur to anyone, and it leads to a completely different role for the central character, one of risk and intrigue and all kinds of cool scenes about working in the belly of the beast. That role is the heart of many great movies.
But we’re dealing with morons, so that’s not what we got.
B) Someone else suggests that Willy Messerschmitt’s daughter was raised in Los Angeles because her dad fled Germany but was kidnapped by the Nazis.
This is a stupid fucking idea that completely destroys any coherent version of idea A. If she was raised in LA then she has no more access to Nazi secrets than Greta Garbo or Jmaes Cagney.
C) Give B, rational plots are out the window, so let’s have the Allies think the way to figure out the secrets to the new fighter is to use Willy Messerschmitt’s daughter as some kind of foreign agent, even though nobody really knows who the fuck she is, because let’s face it, nobody in Germany knows if Willy Messerschmitt had any daughters, nor would they give a flying fuck if he did. She would also need papers. Lots and lots of official papers.
There are very few rational plots at this point.
Any semblance of an actual coherent plot jettisoned, the writers fling shit at a wall.
D) Really dumb idea: We have the Brits airdrop Willy Messerschmitt’s daughter to lead an elite assault team on the Messerschmitt factory, which she has never seen, to steal the plans that are stored in a place that she has no idea how to find, and then transmit the plans before the Nazis blow the factory the hell up.
Someone in the Disney meeting gagged on a donut at this point, so they throw a Hail Mary. There’s no way any military leader who can find his butt with both hands would approve plan D because it makes no fucking sense. It’s like putting Hitler’s nephew in a P-51 as if he would be a war winning weapon as opposed to putting any random pilot in a P-51. So on to plan E, a small band of rebellious dipshits.
E) Willy Messerschmitt’s daughter, having realized Nazis are bad, raids the Messerschmitt factory with some random people she’s met during the parts of the crap script that’s already been green lighted, because there’s no fucking way any sane officer would have signed off on any part of this goat rodeo.
Someone steps in who has some weight with Disney, but doesn’t have enough authority to fire everyone involved in writing this crap, and he does what he can to staunch the bleeding.
F) Kill the characters. Kill them all.
Do not even tempt writers with a sequel. Make sure nobody in the fan base ever thinks about these horribly written characters again. Let’s hope nobody really thinks about this movie before episode VIII comes out.
I could continue, but you get the idea. Having Messerschmitt’s daughter see him die at the gates of a Messerschmitt plant doesn’t make a lick of sense past “she saw her father die – make it happen.”
Nor does the repeated idea that fighter wings don’t launch until attacking fighter get about five or ten minutes of free shots on their base before someone thinks of maybe launching some opposition, Perhaps the Alliance knows to launch fighter and bomber raids during the defenders’ donut breaks.
This movie definitely reflects the collapse of the liberal education system, but it will give conservative parents a reason for “the talk”. “You see Jeffrey, liberal writers are way dumber than you.”
Perhaps my review would be better if it used Natalya Korolev as the character instead of a Messerschmitt daughter. That would bring up the point that virtually nobody knew who designed the Death Star, and nobody on the project would have any idea who the designer’s daughter is. Heck, the chief designer didn’t know if his daughter was even alive.
I should also point out that if the plans were kept in a secret vault that’s almost impossible to access, then how did the contractors know what to build?
Someone should clean up my review, making the necessary changes, and publish it somewhere. ^_^
It was a great review, George. I feel like I’ve already seen the movie.
Here are some more plot holes I noticed, a few of which I already touched on.
Spoilers ahead, so be warned.
If the construction of the Death Star is so secret, how come everybody knew who Jyn’s father was even though he’d been working on a top secret project for 15 years? Does any American know the name of the engineer in charge of designing the Ford class aircraft carriers? It’s like writing a movie set in 1943 where a girl tells an Italian mobster in New York that she’s Oppenheimer’s daughter – and the mobster knows what that means.
If the plans were kept locked in a secret vault that’s almost impossible to access, then how did the contractors know what to build? How would the Death Star’s maintenance crews know how to fix anything? Obviously the writers never held a job that involved actual equipment and machinery or they’d know that pulling up the prints is a daily activity for any complex installation in the real world.
If the Death Star was sabotaged by the chief designer, set to blow up with any explosion in the core, why didn’t he add a thermal detonator to blow it up the first time the station’s main cannon was fired? It’s not like anyone could have checked the plans to see if the detonator was supposed to be there, and if they did, the plans would say “Yep. Detonator XM01A223 is right where it’s supposed to be,” because he was the one drawing up the plans. He could even have made the detonator remotely trigger when a torpedo impacted the outside of the thermal exhaust port, or detonate when some texts star ninety-nine to 1-800-STAR WARS.
If the Death Star was sabotaged by the chief designer, who told the rebels how to blow it up, then the claims in Episode IV are bullshit. It wasn’t brilliant rebel engineers who found a flaw in the Death Star. They were told about the flaw by the Imperial engineer who built in the flaw on purpose.
With rebel ships flying all over the place above the facility that had the plans, why didn’t they just pick up the girl who had them instead of letting her get blown up?
If the people on the surface could talk to the rebel ships attacking the shield, why did they need to drop the shield to transmit the plans?
If Jyn needed to re-orient the antenna to transmit the plans, how was she able to transmit the plans after the antenna was blown up?
Why have we never seen a “shield gate” before, and why would anyone make an orbiting shield generator that’s not actually protected by the shield it’s generating?
If the Alliance didn’t know anything about Jyn’s father except that he was a “known Imperial collaborator in weapons development” and a “tool of the Imperial war machine”, why did they give two hoots about her or her father’s project? If they wanted to drag her father before the Imperial Senate, why didn’t they use the Senate to find out where all the military spending was going? If she hasn’t seen her father in 15 years and believes he’s dead, why in hell would they think she would be any help in finding him? Perhaps they should have hired a private detective instead.
If the Alliance is a force for good, how come they blackmailed Jyn, a young girl with no Imperial ties, with trumped up charges to get her to do their bidding?
How would they know her father is critical to the weapon program if they didn’t even know what the program is?
How could the entire Senate not know what it is funding? Building the Death Star took enormous resources and tens of thousands of workers, and the construction wasn’t hidden in a valley in Tennessee, it was in orbit around a planet. Kind of hard to miss something like that.
In the initial scene the chief designer feigned mental issues and said his brain wasn’t as sharp as it used to be. Then the Imperials killed his wife while his daughter ran off and evaded them. So why did he go ahead and build the Death Star when they didn’t have any remaining leverage on him? That makes no sense at any level for any character ever written by man. A real character would be bent on vengeance, surrounded by other character who rightly know that he his bent on vengeance. He does not get a security clearance and he does not pass Go.
Female superhero? Kind of tiresome and unrealistic.
No thanks.
No, Star Wars is not hard SF. It’s space opera. It’s supposed to be FUN, nothing more. That was a big part of what was wrong with episodes 1-3, they tried to put all this serious political stuff in, and some science. To heck with that. I want space battles and light saber duels and the good guys win and the bad guys lose. If I want more serious stories, or more realistic science, there’s Star Trek, Niven and Pournelle, or Robert L. Forward.
BTW, if Hillary had access to the Death Star plans then the rebels could have just hacked her illegal home-brew server in the closet, probably from the Mos Eisley cantina’s WiFi network, and the whole movie could have been skipped.
Great plots require greater writers. Most movies would be over in five minutes if the characters acted intelligently. When the first Alien movie came out I remember the entire audience yelling “let ’em breath vacuum” from the first scene which is what happened at the end after the whole crew was dead.
On an episode of The Big Bang Theory Sheldon’s girlfriend Amy told him that the entire premise of Indiana Jones is based on something pretty stupid. If Indiana Jones hadn’t found the Ark before the Nazis, the exact same thing would have happened… The Nazis would have found it, opened it, and been killed by it.
And Rogue One just opens up new plot holes. If the chief designer was sabotaging the Death Star so that it would blow up if anything at all hit the reactor core, why didn’t he add a thermal detonator that would automatically blow up the reactor core when the Death Star’s gun was fired? It’s not like anyone would realize the detonator isn’t supposed to be there because nobody could access the plans – which were in any even blown up by the Death Star, raising the question as to how they managed to build a second one.
My favorite thing is spotting things that others think is a blunder but actually isn’t. People thought it a blunder that Indy could swim to the NAZI sub then not drown during the ride. But subs of that era typically did not submerge unless required which isn’t for normal operations.