Abrams has a habit of creating continuity holes that are so gaping and obscene that if they are taken seriously they ruin franchises both after and even before the continuity holes.
One example is magic transporter technology in Trek that makes spaceships kind of pointless if it's applied on a practical scale.
The other is "why have any kind of weapon except small objects equipped with hyperdrives?"
EDIT: I forgot, the weaponized hyperdrive thing was Rian Johnson's doing. Abrams just did "THE DEATH STAR, BUT BIGGER" and with one shot of it (and a flashback of a burning building) basically erased everything that the rebels (and Luke) had won in the previous trilogy.
The warp drive seems to be almost instantaneous in the Abrams Star Trek movies, too. In the second one, the Enterprise traveled from Klingon space to the outskirts of Earth in a matter of minutes. In Deep Space Nine, that journey took about ten days.
At that point you wonder why ships in the JJ-verse even need to have multiple crew shifts and sleeping arrangements, if they can zip to whatever planet they like in the time it takes to cook a Pop Tart.
The more that was emphasized as an actual plot beat, the worse those movies tended to be received. The most fondly remembered ones at least implied a sense of distance and travel time, such as Wrath of Khan and Undiscovered Country.
Yeah but it always conveyed a sense of time and distance and scale and coherency. Fast-travelling like a video game kind of shits on the "trek" part of the title.
Abrams' local bullshit contribution was "THE DEATH STAR, BUT BIGGER" and with one shot of it (and a flashback of a burning building) basically erased everything that the rebels (and Luke) had won in the previous trilogy.
The only way it makes sense is if it's totally ineffective against shields or something like that, and the FO just happened not to have theirs powered up because they were in such a dominant position.
If I could rewrite TLJ I would completely scrap the "resistance" plot. There's literally no need for it, you could just say that they're fighting in the background and occasionally show glimpses of it while the named characters do their things.
I mean, if you want to treat start wars like it's hard sci-fi, instead of space opera or space fantasy, then there is plenty of hand wavy pseudo science you can come up with to explain why this worked in this one instance.
At the end of the day it's fucking star wars. It's fun, but it's slop too. Just stop thinking about it so much.
Abrams has a habit of creating continuity holes that are so gaping and obscene that if they are taken seriously they ruin franchises both after and even before the continuity holes.
One example is magic transporter technology in Trek that makes spaceships kind of pointless if it's applied on a practical scale.
The other is "why have any kind of weapon except small objects equipped with hyperdrives?"
EDIT: I forgot, the weaponized hyperdrive thing was Rian Johnson's doing. Abrams just did "THE DEATH STAR, BUT BIGGER" and with one shot of it (and a flashback of a burning building) basically erased everything that the rebels (and Luke) had won in the previous trilogy.
The warp drive seems to be almost instantaneous in the Abrams Star Trek movies, too. In the second one, the Enterprise traveled from Klingon space to the outskirts of Earth in a matter of minutes. In Deep Space Nine, that journey took about ten days.
At that point you wonder why ships in the JJ-verse even need to have multiple crew shifts and sleeping arrangements, if they can zip to whatever planet they like in the time it takes to cook a Pop Tart.
It's a dumb fun movie and you just need to stop nerding out over things like that. Star Trek was never hard sci-fi, never was.
Maybe not, but it was always about fairly long journeys of days, weeks, months, even years. Instant travel removes the core of the experience.
Yeah, but all the movies tend to feature more or less instant travel, even the old ones
The more that was emphasized as an actual plot beat, the worse those movies tended to be received. The most fondly remembered ones at least implied a sense of distance and travel time, such as Wrath of Khan and Undiscovered Country.
Yeah but it always conveyed a sense of time and distance and scale and coherency. Fast-travelling like a video game kind of shits on the "trek" part of the title.
That one isn't even on Abrams, that's all at Johnson's feet.
I'm a TLJ apologist but even I got taken out by how well the hyperspace ram worked. It immediately raised so many worldbuilding questions
Abrams' local bullshit contribution was "THE DEATH STAR, BUT BIGGER" and with one shot of it (and a flashback of a burning building) basically erased everything that the rebels (and Luke) had won in the previous trilogy.
I should have remembered that; yeah you're right, Abrams had nothing to do with that particular asspull.
The only way it makes sense is if it's totally ineffective against shields or something like that, and the FO just happened not to have theirs powered up because they were in such a dominant position.
If I could rewrite TLJ I would completely scrap the "resistance" plot. There's literally no need for it, you could just say that they're fighting in the background and occasionally show glimpses of it while the named characters do their things.
I mean, if you want to treat start wars like it's hard sci-fi, instead of space opera or space fantasy, then there is plenty of hand wavy pseudo science you can come up with to explain why this worked in this one instance.
At the end of the day it's fucking star wars. It's fun, but it's slop too. Just stop thinking about it so much.
It'd be easier to "dae le popcorn dae le turn your brain off" if something in the movie was actually entertaining enough to pay attention to.
I know it's all subjective, but I thoroughly enjoyed the last Jedi. I thought the ramming scene was spectacular