I'm actually really surprised how unimpressive visually this movie is. I mean, the special effects are mostly ok, but there is nothing really impressive visually, because there is nothing creative done with all that money and technology. Like in most ways, I find Abram's Star Trek vastly superior- we had the great design of Narada or the beatifully shot scene of Enterprise emerging from hiding in the gass cloud or whatever it was. The opening battle between USS Kelvin and Narada is something on a whole different level than anything in Episode VII, in terms of visuals and direction (the fantastic, eerie silent moment is just chilling). Even the scene of Vulcan being destroyed is way better then the Starkiller base demonstrating it's power. The planet crumbling inside looks much more scary than the silly bending laser beams.

Not to mention of course that knowing what Vulcan is, and seeing Spock's desperate rescue attempt gives it a much more powerful emotional charge than destroying some unknown planets of no real consequence to the movie or the audience.

And even so some o f the CGI is surprisingly poor. Snoke and and especially Maz Kanata look way too bad for a movie like this.

I still say it's a way better movie than any of the prequels, but it mostly comes down to the downright terrible execution of almost every aspect of the prequels. I think the best way to put it is that ine the prequels, you can sort of see a better movie trapped under all the shit of bad writing and direction, and in Episode VII what you see is what you get, there is nothing more to it, never was. It's as shallow and mediocre as it gets.

Check it out! I ran into Sambo12345 IRL yesterday and got this pic of his car as he drove away! :D

I feel like hurting that person. With a chainsaw.

oh that's pretty bad.

that's really pretty bad.

muhfuqar be goin to star wars hell for this one. one with darth sidious. and force lightning. and olive oil. lots of olive oil.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0I6mhZ5wMw

Sambo did exactly that in here. I still say we should have killed him. :P

loosed an angry wookie on him!

Not sure if it's been mentioned yet, but I get the impression Rey is Luke's daughter.

I think is so clear that is Han Solo daughter, because all the CLUES (yeah they call it now clues... in the Millenium Falcon) separated for whatever the reason (maybe Luke) from her brother, and Leia blablablabla...

This would be the "surprise" of the next movie... sic...

Yes, the retarded one.

Looks like that old conspiracy theory about Luke and Leia getting down to business somewhere between Empire and ROTJ is starting to make sense. That Skywalker family tree keeps losing branches. Can't figure it out.

A slight bit of weirdness: we just went to see Force Awakens yesterday again, this time in German after seeing it in the UK a couple of weeks ago. While they've stuck to the same voice actors for the legacy actors/characters (the voice for Luke in the trailer was the original from the 70s/80s, and so were the voices for Leia and Han), there seems to be a bit of dissonance between the way Carrie Fisher's voice has evolved into a kind of croaky "grandmotherly" voice over the years (no doubt a result of decades of smoking) and the way Susanna Bonasewicz (her dub actress) sounds exactly the same as she did back in 1983.

It's kind of strange: you look at Leia in Force Awakens and she's changed so much over the years that it's actually hard to see her as the same actress that played Leia over 30 years ago, but you hear the German dub and it just "clicks" again.

I've been reading this theory a lot, and it certainly seems to tally up with the second teaser trailer (the one narrated by Luke), but narratively it makes no sense.I have to wonder if that narration was specifically recorded for the trailer or whether it was from a deleted scene, I suspect the former.

If Rey is Luke's daughter then there's got to be a mother, and for dramatic effect it stands to reason that we would have already seen her in the story. I very much doubt that Disney is going to run with a Luke & Leia incest storyline (morals aside, it's narratively implausible that such an event wouldn't have at least somehow been referenced in ROTJ).

The only female character in TFA that even remotely comes into question would be Captain Phasma, and Gwendoline Christie is honestly too young to believably portray Rey's mother.

The only way this could really work is if they introduced a new character as her mother, but that would come across as really lazy writing.

I have to say, I can't understand how you can watch movies dubbed. You're losing half the actors' actuall work. I always avoid dubbing like the plague. I see it creeping in more and more. It used to be only animated movies got dubbed here, now many others do to, like Star Wars and the Marvel movies, but there is still always an un-dubbed version too. For now. If ever there is only a dubbed version, I'll just have to stop going to the cinema alltogether.

Nah, Chewbacca's offspring...
Over dub is here (its an old one, but still quite funny):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIfMRbb5KBQ

We don't really have a lot of choice in Germany - most cinemas only show the dubbed versions and that's it. Some cinemas do one English-language showing of a popular film a week and that's it. Those cinemas seem to have pretensions that showing a film in its original language makes that cinema somehow "sophisticated".

To be honest, German cinemas are among the worst I've seen in Europe - absolutely no sense of quality or culture, generally seeking to appeal to the lowest common denominator and completely tone-deaf to the demands of their clientele, which is why the cinema industry here has been on a constant downwards spiral economically ever since the early 2000s. We're also possibly the only country where cinemas also try to "force" 3D versions onto its audiences. It was quite funny coming out of Star Wars because a 3D showing was finishing up in the screen opposite our 2D showing, and there were two people sat there versus our completely booked-out showing.

I know most other countries at least show films in the original language alongside dubbed versions (and some, like the Netherlands and the Scandinavian countries, don't show dubbed films at all, except for kids' stuff), in this respect Germany is very backwards.

Of course, Eastern Europe is a unique case - in Poland in particular, many films were only available with a voice-over narrator (and this remains to date with TV series as far as I'm aware) because it simply wasn't cost-effective to dub films - they were just coming out of communism, not many people had money, and having one guy read all of the translations was much cheaper than hiring a professional dubbing team. Subtitled versions were better able to establish themselves on the market before proper dubbing became a thing, so it seems to have stuck (just watched the Polish-dubbed TFA trailer, found it hilarious how they apparently struggled to fit "Gwiezdne Wojny" on the screen :) ).

We do have an option to see films in English in a cinema in Hamburg (about an hour from us), for which we will be seeing the 70mm version of The Hateful Eight in English. But it's a long trek for the "non-event" films where we just want to spend a relaxed evening.

Edit: Just discovered the "Student Dub" of A New Hope :) :) :)