They seem much better when compared with Padme and Anakin (either Anakin).
It was a great movie, and it’s been a long time since I saw one where it was culturally taboo to risk spoiling it for anyone else. Soooo, my sons and I decided to make-up spoilers just to mess with people. Made my sister so mad, and she was even more upset after she saw the movie and learned I was yanking her chain. Wrong, but funny.
I made my kids watch A New Hope and the Empire Strikes Back before we went to TFA. REALLY enjoyed it. I expected to hate BB8 with the glowing passion of a 1000 ewoks but he was fine. Glad to see all the old characters as part of the ensemble.
My teen daughter thinks Hans is hot.
We had tried to watch the prequels, we got through the first one and couldn’t stand it. Outside of the guy playing palpatine, and Ewen Macgregor channeling Alec Guiness, those movies were as bad as I remember, bad casting (the kid was unbearable), the characters, it all just stank. Even Christopher Lee couldn’t save it, and I absolutely loved him as an actor (and a genuine bada** I will add, he was in the SAS during WWII). Watching those movies, it was like Lucas wanted to do them, but couldn’t figure out why he made the originals in the first place, and it turned into this detailed mess explaining things that didn’t need to be explained, political minutae and so forth. He took it much too seriously, when the original was basically an homage to the old space operas of the 30’s and 40’s, and it came out like a detailed analysis in a film class, not something fun to watch. The new one, on the other hand, I think captured the spirit of the original pretty well, and didn’t try to take itself too seriously.
Christopher Lee was actually pretty good in the second of the prequels–it was refreshing when he finally appeared. His fight with Yoda is fun, also. But the love story is just so awful that it overshadows everything else. We were discussing whether we might like it better dubbed into a language we didn’t understand. (This is “Attack of the Clones” I’m talking about.)
I came up with, and subsequently read, the theory that Rey was left on Jakku by Kylo Ren himself, who is either her brother or cousin–he was supposed to kill her along with all the other Jedi trainees, but wasn’t completely gone to the dark side then so hid her away instead. I think this would have to mean that her memory has been wiped, because she seemed old enough to know who her family was.
I went to the London premier! I have never been to anything like that before. It was very exciting. There were lots of crazy fans in the street.
We saw the new movie twice. The first time was on a big screen in a regular theater, with annoyingly small 3D glasses. Then we saw it again, on the giant IMAX screen at the National Air and Space Museum Udvar-Hazy Center. I won’t say it was a different movie, but it was quite different. (The 3D glasses were better, too.) Anybody who has the chance to see it there, or on a similar screen, I highly recommend it.
We didn’t see it in 3D since I gather it wasn’t actually filmed to be in 3D. Except for Avatar, I really don’t think 3D has done much for any movie I’ve seen, and there are always enough scenes where things look like layers of 2D that bother me and break the fourth wall as far as I am concerned.
I don’t think 3D added too much to this particular movie. There’s one scene where a Star Destroyer comes out at you that’s pretty cool, but not much beyond that. It was worth seeing it on a really giant screen though, and I suspect those are likely to mostly be 3D showings.
We did the EXACT same thing and had the exact same response-- that’s 2 hours of my life wasted I will never get back…
GMT - they are not all bad. There is a cameo of the millennium falcon for a few seconds.
We just rewatched 4-6 first. I saw 1 back in the day, which convinced me NOT to watch 2 or 3. I don’t think I’ll ever feel the lack.
We finally went yesterday.
I loved Rey, loved that there were women in the movie, and the movie even passes the Bechdel test (barely). But still, as with almost every movie, it’s mostly males. And a lot of the tie-in toys and action figures were all male, leaving out Rey.
Not only did they kill off Han, but they made Han and Leia not have been happy together before he died. Sniff 
I was hoping Han would say something like, “I’ve never stopped loving you,” so she could reply, “I know.”
We took my mother-in-law to see the new movie–she didn’t know any of the characters, and doesn’t know Trek from Wars. She liked it though. She asked us, “Who was the ape?” Ape? What ape? We figured out that she meant Chewbacca.
In the prequels, they had a great opportunity to make the darkness of Darth Vadar come about as tragically inevitable, like King Lear or some other tragedy. Or, they could have at least made him brilliant and rebellious, like Benedict Arnold. It was just so badly done. That scene where the twins are being born and Darth Vadar is being helmeted, oh ugh! Maybe they will be remade one day…
And then we can have yet another actor digitally inserted into the original trilogy as a Force ghost!
Oh my! My H was talking to some colleagues and one of them told the story of watching this scene in the movie theater. She said there was someone behind her who kept whispering reactions throughout the movie. When it came to this scene the talkative woman gasped in shock…as if she didn’t know where the story was going!
It would be interesting to hear the thoughts of somebody who watched the movies in chronological order without any advance knowledge. Would they be surprised to learn that Palpatine is the bad guy, or is it obvious from the start? When they got to Episode 4, would they say, “Where is all the interesting political intrigue that characterized Episodes 1-3?”
Hunt, it would ruin the movies to watch them chronologically. The whole luke i am your father thing and all . . .