Disney's betrayal of Star Wars

Disney bought Star Wars, or rather they bought Lucasarts who owns Star Wars, at the time there was some applause as it looked like we got new movies in a franchise that had been silent for a while (not counting games and animated shows).

Then Disney put Kathleen Kennedy in charge, which seems like a bad idea in retrospect, from now on I will refer to Kathleen Kennedy as KK.

KK then did something unforgivable, she torched the extended universe, although that would have been much more interesting to investigate than the movies that eventually was made.

Having just torched the Extended Universe KK then set out tot create new movies, teaming up with J J Abrams to create these movies, who was a pretty hot director having made a successful television series Lost, he essentially recreated "A New Hope" in his Star Wars debut "The Force Awakens", which honestly is the least horrible of the Disney trilogy, it at least did nothing exceedingly stupid.

There is however plenty of issues with this movie, I will only list a few issues here.

What I consider the most stupid decision is the premise for the new trilogy, resetting all the progress the "rebellion" made in the OT, but if JJ Abrams did not reset the whole thing he could not rip off "A New Hope", perhaps this would be a good reason to not rip off that movie.

That is just the premise for the whole trilogy, but there is a lot more in this movie to be unhappy about.

Fyi Spoilers, if you have not seen "The Force Awakens".

I will not touch to much on the story from here on out, since I have already said all about that I find necessary to say.

So now I come to some possibly more nitpicky things, but I don't care.

One thing that I dislike about this movie, and the new trilogy in general and what to me constitute the betrayal of Star Wars is the whole killing off the main characters, namely Han Solo, Luke Skywalker, and Leia Skywalker, in that order too.

I would have preferred to have them not be killed off at all, Star Wars is sort of Skywalker's Saga.

Back to critiquing "The Force Awakens".

So lets talk about Snoke, in some fashion it seems JJ Abrams just used him as a "Mystery Box", his now famous technique to drum up interest, but it is essentially a pointless technique if you cannot fulfill the promise, which JJ Abrams has proven completely incapable of doing with "Lost", he could build the promise exceedingly well, but never had a thought for how to finish the story and tying a neat knot on it, this is essentially the most essential skill in telling a good story.

So Snoke is just a distraction, or if JJ Abrams against expectation actually had a plan leave it to Ryan Johnson to ruin that, although I think JJ Abrams having a deeper idea with introducing the classical villain is exceedingly unlikely.

So Snoke is really not worth energy investigating further, but there is plenty of other problems to complain about.

Let's talk storm troopers.

Episode 1-3 build storm troopers as clones of one person as to be expendable units in a galactic war, fighting against droid's.

In episode 7 storm troopers are no longer clones, this is too me annoying, but if this change leads to some payoff it might be valid. I don't count Finn's story arc as valid for such a big change, also it seems really stupid for a galactic "empire" to use real people if the tech for cloning is available, or just having droid's.

My biggest gripe with episode 7 is in reality the way in which Han Solo was killed off, confronting his son and getting run through with a lightsaber not a very heroic end for such an iconic character. Even worse there is no real purpose to it, he is not buying time for anybody to escape, he does not have any measurable effect on Kylo Ren aka Ben Solo. His death is simply not very meaningful in the story.

One last thing I want to touch on, but it really is not such a big deal, is the lightspeed jump through the barrier surrounding starkiller base, this seems to break with established lore, however innocent it may seem, it helps to setup a much bigger hole in the next episode, but more on that later.

For now I bid you farewell.