Dear Juhana,
I think a few times in history I’ve felt like commenting on your blog, but I’ve got to the bottom and it says ‘Tweet me here or open a topic on intfiction.’
A lot of people don’t use Twitter at all. I’m more vituperative than that in that if the only avenue of comms someone offers is via Twitter, I don’t communicate with them as a result. But separately and overall, I know that I like comments to go with the blog they’re commenting on, and I suspect others may, too. So I’d encourage you to add that if you want some attached.
Anyway, this is my comment on your Best Of post, mostly Force Awakens, ala nitku.net/blog/2015/12/best-of-2015/
I enjoyed the film alright. I was moved a bit by some of the old characters stuff, and I think the mix of CGI and practical stuff looks great. It’s that I just felt almost nothing afterwards. I felt this film had nothing new to say at all. I mean, to me, it wasn’t clever reversal of any tropes. It just hit the same plot points and content that the original Star Wars film hit.
There’s a new Death Star – again! There’s a way to blow it up. There’s a new R2D2. These things were stand-ins of the old things. George Lucas always liked quoting small moments in different contexts through the first 6 films, and having things re-happen, but in this film they were barely quotes. They just were those things. So overall, I felt it was an extraordinarily conservative venture. I liked Han’s stuff the best (Ford finally got all his life back, as of late) but there was also a void of any Force spirituality.
If I was charitable, I could say that maybe they wanted to be really safe the first time out because there was ill-will from the prequels, and they now want to make films every year or two. What would suck is if they all come out as conservative as this from now on.
Re: the usedness - I thought the prequels were meant to have shinier tech because the galaxy was a lot more functional in that time period, pre-Empire. And that silver ship you pointed out, I know that was deliberately made to be 100% reflective because something they had never been able to do in the first three films was reflections on spacecraft.
When I got in bed the night after seeing Awakens, the prequels suddenly seemed way more radical. Half of their thrust, that was very obscurely expressed in Phantom Menace (with its ‘taxation’ opening scroll) but which came good by Sith, was that governments have to watch for the danger of becoming the thing they fought.
Anyway, thanks for letting me comment on your blog offsite
-Wade