force awakens

Spoiler Free Review

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Doing Silly Things

So the other day I said I would be doing a spoiler free review today, since I was in theory seeing it ahead of a good deal of the potential folks that will eventually see it.  As a result I am leading off my post with the single line tweet that I sent out last night after getting home.  Now I am going to talk about the day and night itself for a bit.  I was not one of those first day ticket scroungers, in fact I ended up waiting at least a week before trying to find any.  We have a smallish theater in town within walking distance of the house…  however last night it fell in the “too damned cold” territory to even consider walking.  For Lord of the Rings I was able to simply walk in on opening night and get tickets, without any pre-order…  so I had no real doubt that I would be able to see the movie this weekend without much fuss.  The original plan was to eat dinner at Plaza De Toros  a Mexican place that I like quite a bit that just happens to conveniently border the parking lot of the movie theater.  Just to make life easier… so we could meet up at 5pm and then walk over and start standing in line around 6pm for the 7pm show.  This at least was our plan…  our plan changed.

I went home over lunch yesterday to pick my tickets up, since pre-orders still need to be printed at the theater in our setup.  I ended up having a lengthy conversation with the worker that was manning the booth, and he told me that they were seating for the 7pm show… aka the first showing as early as 4:30 so that we could go ahead and get seats.  So when I went back and talked it through with my boss, we agreed that we would simply meet at the theater around 5ish instead and either eat at the theater… or like I did and grab something really quickly on the way home.  The positive of both options is our theater has unlimited refills on both soda and popcorn, so my boss went with that option.  The only negative is that I didn’t think to warn him not to take one of the Highways that is notoriously hell to travel on during the evening rush hour… so this meant it was running about 30 minutes later than planned.  Luckily about this time another friend popped her head out of the theater and hollered at me, and saved us some seats near her, her husband that I work with, and their son who was completely amped about the experience and wearing and Ezra Bridger costume.  So there we sat in the theater for an hour and a half ahead of the start time… chatting away and killing the time.

The Movie

Spoiler Free Review

I had a lot of hope riding on this movie… but at the same time I kept trying to prepare myself for the potential of it being just as disappointing as the prequels.  In fact a good deal of my conversation with my friend was that both remember how excited we were for Phantom Menace and how disappointed we were immediately after.  I have to admit… I was not immediately in love with this movie.  Not saying I was disappointed in any fashion… but the movie has a look that is significantly different than the traditional “star wars look” for lack of a better term.  JJ Abrams simply has a different design ethic than George Lucas did… and this is perfectly okay… but I spent the first few moments of the movie “adjusting” to the style.  However at about the twenty minute mark… I was hooked and from that point through the end I was completely drawn into the world and believed that I was in fact watching a new Star Wars epic.  The characters are all excellent, and more importantly than that… their interactions…  are also awesome. There are jokes and quips… and not in a way that takes you outside of the picture.  Much of this movie had to be about passing the torch from one generation to the next… and feel like we are now firmly introduced to the conflict through the eyes of Rey, Finn, Poe Dameron, and Kylo Ren.  Not really going to delve into characters outside of the group, because those are the ones we already know quite a bit about thanks to the trailers.

What I like the most is that each of these characters is their own “new” character… and not “The New Vader” or “The New Luke”.  They are each their own person and don’t really fit any predetermined molds in the Star Wars universe.  The conflict that is set up… is one that I cannot wait to see resolved over the course of the next few movies.  In fact I am hungry to see what happens next…. which is something that never happened during the prequels.  This is the first “new” story that we have had from Star Wars on the big screen in a very long while, because the prequels had a fixed beginning and a fixed end point… and we were simply seeing how the details worked themselves out between.  This time with Force Awakens… we have no clue what is going to happen in the beginning, middle or end… and in spite of all of our machinations and predictions… we know that we know next to nothing.  There are certain aspects that I think seasoned veterans of Star Wars and the Expanded Universe might guess at…. but those guesses are never justified with a firm answer.  This movie feels very much in the tradition of A New Hope, and also feels like this grand Star Wars pen and paper adventure… played out on the screen.  The critics are more than likely not going to like it… because this is absolutely a “Star Wars” movie… and not something that is trying to get an Oscar.  That said… the costuming and use of practical effects absolutely SHOULD get an Oscar.

The little kid in me is alive and happy.  There was a period of time after the prequels where I doubted if my memories of Star Wars were really genuine.  I wondered if the universe really was as cool as I remembered it.  I am happy to say that yes…  this setting still has amazing things to show us.  Now stop reading this shit and go get tickets to see Force Awakens.

 

Predictions and Dots

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Star Wars Predictions

Predictions and Dots

It is in fact the day… and I have reached full on Kermit Flail status.  All day yesterday my brain kept going “Star Wars! Star Wars! Star Wars!” and I have zero clue how I am going to be a reasonably functional human being today.  The tickets are for 7 pm tonight at my local generally no frills theater…  in 2D… which is honestly the way I would prefer to watch this movie.  If it can blow me away without any frills, then it will have been a good day.  At this point I am largely in a Star Wars information black out other than occasionally checking what the Rotten Tomatoes “freshness” score happens to be.  For most of yesterday it was around the 98% but right now it is sitting at 95%.  I am super thankful that Google shows the score without having to actually click through into the  site, because really I am trying to avoid knowing much of anything about the actual plot.  That said… when the Legion announcement happened in WoW I did a few predictions that morning, some of which were serious… others very much not.  So I thought it might be fun to do my Star Wars: Force Awakens predictions.  Please note that any alignment between these and actual plot points is pure coincidence and based on sheer dumb luck.  I promise I know nothing… and these are not spoilers…  but “wouldn’t it be cools”.

  • Rey – I think it is probably a given at this point that Rey is the child of Luke and Han that somehow got stranded on Jakku, or at least that is my working theory.  There was a shot of Rey and Chewie flying the Millennium Falcon which kinda lead me down this line of thinking.
  • Han – Harrison Ford has long said that the only way he would ever return to the Star Wars franchise is if they were going to kill off his character.  So I think without a doubt Han Solo will die in this movie.  It will be an even bigger shock to me if he doesn’t… because I guess at the end of the day that means that Harrison Ford REALLY likes printing money.  It would be cool if he got used to the fandom, and approached it with less disdain… but I am not holding my breath.
  • Chewie – I think if and when Han dies… the Life Debt that Chewie owes Han…  will transfer to his daughter.  My biggest fear is that they jettisoned the Expanded Universe just so that Chewie would be alive…  only to kill him off again.  This movie should be all about passing the torch to the next generation… but you still need some aspect of the current generation to make that work, and I think Chewie continuing on would be a good callback.
  • Kylo Ren – This one… I am torn on.  For the longest period of time I thought maybe this was also Han and Leia’s kid… if for no reason other than in the Expanded Universe…  their son did in fact turn to the Dark Side.  Now I simply do not know.  I have a feeling he ties into the Skywalker lineage somehow… but at this point it makes me wonder if he will end up being Luke’s son.
  • Luke – One of the big mysteries is what exactly is up with Luke.  I think this one goes one of two ways… either he has turned to the Dark Side himself and becomes the new big baddie … the power behind the throne of sorts.  There are problems with this however… because if that were the case why would Kylo be on this hunt to collect all of these artifacts of Darth Vader… why wouldn’t he just worship the new embodiment of the Dark Side instead.  I think more likely he is going to play the role of Obi Wan from the first movie… where he has isolated himself from the world and we go on a hunt to find him, where he is slightly mad in an almost Jorus C’Baoth style.
  • Poe Dameron – I think a safe bet would be he somehow ties lineage back to a member of the Rogue Squadron that we will come to know during the Rogue Squadron breakout movie.  That said I am going to go down my “wouldn’t it be cool” line of thought…  and say… wouldn’t it be awesome if he turned out to be the child of Boba Fett?  I mean he bears a vague resemblance to both Jango and Boba as seen in the prequels, and I mean… vague… because its not like Boba looked exactly like Jango.
  • Finn – I really have no real guesses on this one.  My fear is that they will go with the simple answer and make him Lando’s kid.  I would love to think that he is tied into the original cast somehow.  I know in theory he could be the child of Han Solo and Sana Solo which was introduced as Han’s wife in the comics.  I’ve long thought that Han himself was a force sensitive… because his unnatural luck at times…  could just literally be latent force sensitivity.  I think Finn is going to play into the main story line in an important way, and we know he at least ends up wielding a light saber… so could he be also of the Skywalker lineage somehow?

Whatever the case any of these things might be… I am just hoping that I really and truly love the movie.  I need this to be awesome… because I am still so disappointed in the prequels.  I am even wearing my special Star Wars vans today…  in hopes that tonight will be a truly awesome experience.

Warlocking

Predictions and Dots

In theory Wednesday night is the night that I raid with Jed and crew, but I needed the night off.  It has been a pretty crazy week, and with something scheduled almost evening…  Wednesday night was really the only night I truly had to sit at home at chill.  So instead of raiding I ended up working on the new holiday quests.  The positive is that there is now a whole sequence of Winters Veil quests that start from your Garrison, the negative is that one of them is horrifically bugged and largely impossible to complete if you wish to retain your sanity.  I guess in theory if you caught the quest during off hours you would do just fine, but since this is the sort of thing you want to do on every character that can possibly do it…  it means that the area is pretty much constantly camped.  Realistically they should have had the Alliance event happen in Shadowmoon Valley and the Horde event happen in Frostfire Ridge…  because simply getting there is a bit of a pain in the ass for my Alliance characters.  The worst part about the new quests is that Christmas has now also become a mount chase… with these chests purchasable from the vendor in your garrison for essentially one days worth of tokens.  If you are insanely lucky like apparently Jaedia…  you can end up getting the Minion of Grumpus mount…  which I will be shooting for during this event.

After fiddling with holiday bits, I relaxed to an evening of working on my new Orc Warlock.  Essentially I am leveling just like I would an arcanist, which means running around like mad and dotting things up.  The end result seems to be a pretty rapid fire way to level… and I am already out leveling the content.  Granted I am fully decked out in heirlooms which is in part what is making that be a thing.  Mostly I am just trying to push my way into “dungeon” levels as fast as I can so that hopefully I can be queued for a dungeon the entire time I am leveling.  If nothing else I am enjoying myself which is a first when it comes to Warlocks.  I’ve always been interested in the class… because demons…  but always struggled with getting into the spirit.  However during the AggroChat podcast and through playing Final Fantasy XIV… I am learning that I basically tried playing all dot based classes wrong, and that the answer is in fact to run around like mad, dotting everything up and watching it just die before my eyes.  So upon leveling this Warlock that is absolutely my new MO, and so far … it seems to be working.  I needed a chill out class to play and this one is fitting the bill.

Media Consumption – 10/31/2015

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Happy Halloween

Media Consumption – 10/31/2015

This was another week where I mostly just watched things on YouTube.  That said I did dig up a few gems that I feel are worth sharing.  My weekend is going to be a bit odd because last night we recorded AggroChat so the members of our podcast that have social lives… can go out and do social things.  I on the other hand plan on playing the new Funcom single player game “The Park” in honor of the holiday.  I am not 100% sure if I am going to stream it or not, but I will likely record it.  I have heard it is honestly not that long of a game, but it seems just about right for Halloween fun time.  Other than that…  I have this fear that because of the cold snap I am starting to also get a cold…  I know it doesn’t work that way but still.  So I am starting to preemptively medicate myself, because I really don’t want to be sick again…  after having recently spent entirely too much time sick.

The Book of Sorrows

This is absolutely amazing… and you should stop what you are doing and spend the next hour and a half listening to this.  I may or may not be a bit obsessed with Destiny and its oddly coherent… but insanely difficult to find Lore.  This lore has traditionally been pieced together in a manner that can only be fully represented if you imagine a basement somewhere… with newspaper clippings, photos, scribbled writings…  all connected together with red string with various bits and pieces circled and text scrawled on it that says “this means something”.  Seriously to understand Destiny lore is to lose a significant part of your sanity.  With the Taken King release…. they made things a bit easier in a way that peeling an orange with your bare hands… is easier than trying to do it with a pair of those weird mechanical lab arms that you see in science fiction labs.  Throughout the new items there are some items called Calcified Fragments… and each one you collect unlocks another tidbit of a tome called the Book of Sorrows.  This actual book…  outlines the progression of the hive from being this tiny race that lived only ten years…  to the immortal monster that it is today.  This shit is really good… and at some point I will listen to it again.  The channel I linked is pretty damned amazing… because it is voice acted in a manner you would expect an audio book to be done.  Extremely worth your time…  seriously listen to this now.

Star Wars Original Trilogy – Force Awakens Mash-up

Another thing I am also completely enamored with right now is Force Awakens and anything else that seems like  Force Awakens.  The measure of hype and love that I am feeling for Star Wars right now…  is insane.  The awesome thing about it is that right now I am rocking a R2-D2 beanie… and it is insane the amount of friends I make because of it.  I had a long conversation about Star Wars Battlefront last night with the grocery store cashier because it all started with a “Man I love your beanie”.  If you want to be crushed with feels….  watch this above video.  The creator took scenes from the original trilogy, and cut it to fit the thematic elements of the Force Awakens trailer and that soundtrack.  Seriously…  I felt shivers when I watched this thing… and then was just overwhelmed with emotion upon its conclusion.  I am probably overselling it…  but you know I get super excited about things so…  watch this too.

Detroit Trailer

A few years back there was this amazing tech demo running on the Playstation 3 hardware called Kara, about this android that feels more emotional than it should.  We wondered for years what would become of it…. if anything would come of it.  It was this great experience of trans-humanism and my friends and I all sort of hoped it would be more than just a tech demo someday.  Turns out they are in fact working on a game surrounding that same universe, and they are setting it in Detroit.  Not sure exactly what the appeal of Detroit is for non-American developers…  but apparently it has some because there seem to be an awful lot of games set in this city.  The game looks pretty awesome, and it is going to be interesting to see what ramifications come from being a “free range android” of sorts.  Reminds me quite a bit of the show Humans, which deals with similar issues.

Destiny re-cut to Force Awakens

I said I was obsessed with Force Awakens right now… and also Destiny… and this video connects the two.  Similar to the original Star Wars trilogy trailer, this takes the sound and voice over associated with the Force Awakens trailer and edits it to Destiny footage.  I think it works pretty great, and I felt the same sort of warm fuzzies watching this as I did the other…  I was honestly shocked at just how well it worked.  The strange thing is… the guy that did this apparently almost exclusively re-cuts movie trailers to Destiny footage… but honestly most of them don’t work nearly as well as this one.

Walking Dead

I thought I would throw a footnote in here really quick…  just to say I am not going to talk about this episode.  Mostly because I don’t want anyone to accidentally have it spoiled.  Some shit happens… some major shit…  and Monday morning we tried to sort through all of it.  We were seriously distraught because we were uncertain what the events of the show meant for the franchise as a whole.  Then…  one of us found some leaked information…  which makes me even less likely to write about it.  Right now…  I am just not sure how I feel about it… what happened… what supposedly will happen.  As a result I just am not going to talk about it other than what I have just said here.  Since however I have gotten in the habit of running down each new episode, I thought I would at least leave a footnote.

Media Consumption 10/24/2015

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Week of Star Wars

Media Consumption 10/24/2015This week was extremely dominated by my burgeoning love of Star Wars.  I have written many times about how I just was not feeling the franchise after the prequels… and that all of the hype surrounding me has rekindled that little kid inside of me that wanted to be “darfa bader”.  I’ve always loved the empire more than the rebels, and I feel kinda bad about that… but Storm Troopers and Darth Vader….  come on.  I was sick for a chunk of the week and while home sick… I caught up on a few things… namely Star Wars Rebels.  So without further rambling… lets talk about stuff.

Star Wars: Force Awakens – Trailer 3

This trailer is absolutely amazing and only serves to bump my hype for this movie up to a fever pitch.  This honestly scares me more than a little bit.  I am as excited right now for Force Awakens as I was for Phantom Menace… and we all know how that turned out.  I think the thing that gives me confidence more than anything is the giant trail of money attached to this movie.  Disney paid four billion dollars to purchase the Star Wars franchise… and I think the realize if this movie is the stinker than Phantom Menace was… they have essentially flushed the vast majority of that money down the toilet.  That said I have also come to realize that quite simply I don’t think George Lucas knows how to direct human beings with human emotions.  I’ve recently watched the prequels again… and those movies are full of some really damned good actors… all of which are chewing up scenery with some of the most unnatural dialog and acting I have seen.  You take those same actors and put them in quite literally any other movie and they do amazing jobs… so it has the be the movies themselves that are the problem.  Anyways… enough of that and on to the trailer.

I love the feel of this trailer, how it is a sequence of more fleshed out vignettes this time.  I have gone back and forth on the popular conspiracies and at this point I simply don’t have a clue.  I don’t know why Luke Skywalker isn’t on the movie poster, and I am starting to question if it is him with the robotic hand reaching out to R2-D2.  I am playing this game of “who is the Skywalker”, and I right now I am starting to think that maybe Rey, Finn and Kylo Ren are all connected to the previous trilogy.  I am still leaning heavily towards Kylo Ren being the child of Han and Leia who has now turned to the Dark Side and become essentially a Vader fanboy… since he knows that Vader was essentially his Grandfather.  You see Rey behind the seat of the Millennium Falcon in one of the shots that has come out… so that would lead you to believe that maybe she is ALSO the child of Han and Leia…  maybe sibling to Kylo?  Finn is the one I cannot place…  since we see him wielding a lightsaber we know he is a force sensitive.  Makes me wonder if maybe he is the child of Luke, but with whom.  He could also be the child of Sana Solo which is now apparently the in canon wife of Han.  I feel like a lot of this movie is going to center around Kylo Ren essentially going on an Artifact hunt trying to find relics of Vader, but past that I am not sure of anything.  I am absolutely looking forward to December so I can finally see how the pieces are going to fit together.

Star Wars Rebels

Media Consumption 10/24/2015

While sick this week I caught up on watching Star Wars Rebels, which I found out you can stream from the Disney XD website so long as you have a cable provider to validate with.  The only problem with this is that it isn’t really clear where one season ends and the next begins.  At this point I am apparently caught up and into season two, and I have to say this show… is so great and just what we needed to bridge some gap between the prequels and the modern age movies.  This show is essentially about the birth of the Rebellion as we know it episodes four through six.  I’ve talked about the show in the past on my blog, and I will warn you it honestly takes a few episodes before it starts to feel right.  Sabine Wren is awesome… just going to get that out there.  I love Mandalorians and she has this awesome quirky nature that is just great, and I love the fact that she tags her armor every time they take down another imperial target.  I also adore the paint job she did on the captured Tie Fighter.

The coolest part about this show however is the fact that we get to find out what happens to Ahsoka Tano.  That was the biggest problem I had after Clone Wars you weren’t really sure what became of her.  You know she isn’t in any of the prequels…  largely because I don’t think the character existed until the Clone Wars cartoon… but we just know she is not around in any form.  Here we find that she is fighting the good fight and acting as the rebel operative known as “Fulcrum”.  It is awesome to see her again, but we know that issues are going to come up…  and with a brief interaction with Darth Vader he realizes exactly who she is… and that she is still alive.  You are left with the impression that she has her assumptions that Vader is Anakin…  but she isn’t nearly as certain as Vader is in that interaction.  I thought it was awesome that they brought in Commander Cody as well, and it makes me so damned happy that essentially Clone Wars and Rebels are a continuation of the same basic story arc.  I was afraid that all of the great characters that got invented for the Clone Wars show would simply be gone, but now we are seeing them almost all revitalized as part of the Rebels show… which also I believe means they are being inducted into the canon universe.  The hope is that maybe some of these characters will have brief cameos in the new movies as well.

Walking Dead Season 5 – Episode 2

Media Consumption 10/24/2015

Wow… this episode.  I thought the first episode was intense with the quarry full of walkers, and herding them down the path.  This episode starts off very benign showing you how the rest of the characters were spending the time while everyone else was out in the field with the walkers.  Then in a manner so quickly that I thought it might literally be a hallucination…  we see the wolves get into Alexandria and just start slaughtering the residents.  We all knew the wolves would eventually get there, and it seems as though either someone jumped the fence in the same way that Carl and Enid have done…  or someone left the damned gate open again.  Last week we theorized as to who was hitting the car horn and leading the walkers of the pack, but this week we find out that it was instead a semi truck that was heading for one of the walls to break it down.  The gun in the guard tower managed to shoot the driver…  but then the driver fell on the horn while dying.  The episode as a whole was just so strange to see how absolutely feral and blindingly fast the wolves were.

The part I am thankful for however is the fact that essentially this incident forced Carol to abandon her disguise.  She had to become the badass we all know she is, but I do think it is significant that she once again took on the disguise of a wolf, much like she took on the disguise of a walker getting into Terminus.  I think this is the sign of something more with her character… I think she got used to having to wear a mask in the years she was in her abusive marriage, and now it is just comfortable for her to keep adopting them in order to stay safe.  This episode however was a tale of two styles conflicting…  the monk like pacifism of Morgan, and the brutal and honest force of Carol.  The body count from this episode was massive and I think in one show we have whittled down the folks in Alexandria to only the reliable and self sufficient ones are left.  The wolves came in and killed all of the sheep as it were…  all of the people who simply could not take care of themselves.  As a result I think Alexandria is going to be a vastly different place in the coming weeks as they have to deal with this horde of walkers bearing down upon the walls.  I am amped for this week to see what happens next.