Star Wars - The Force Awakens - Pro's and Cons - Spoiler Alert

If you're a well-read, or well-watched, sci-fi person, Star Wars is the lightweight of the genre. There is no getting around that. ,

It has had much more impact than other offerings because it was able to find an audience larger than any of them before it, and even since, maintains it's own type of loyalty. George Lucas will tell you it it is because it is a widely appealing action romance that just happens to be in space. This is what allows it to overcome some serious shortcomings in plot development, and twists.

The Force Awakens demonstrates this, both with it's popularity now, already becoming the highest grossing film in history, and it's content.

To judge it as a shrewd sci-fi fan is not fair, it was born into a world, nay, CREATED the worlds in which we compare star fighters for their performance, and alien species dialects. Star Trek dragged a cart down this road, Star Wars put it in hyper/warp speed.

Star Wars lives on it's entertainment value.
That's what I am writing towards, after letting it all settle in for a couple weeks.

• New characters
• Poe, Ray - these are good characters, good young actors, and hold some promise.  - Pro
• Fin - I really like Fin, and he is a good addition to this story and theme, but why did they have to be so lazy bring him in. I cover this in further detail below, but realized as I edit that I forgot to mention him as a character. 
• Kylo Ren/ Ben Solo, not sold yet. The character premise itself bothers me because he very much feels like he's been dropped in, and a thought I had in the theater seat was 'Wow, they could actually pull two films out of his training and turn just like they did for Anakin in Episodes 1-3. ' The actor, I had to look it up after the movie to make sure he wasn't Nick SImmons, son of Gene Simmons, except that he looked a lot like Nick back when they were doing the show, ten years ago. I am not sure how I feel about how awkward looking he is, the actor, but I suppose he does have some chops, so in my edit I am calling this a half-Con, still not buying in 100%.  - half -Con
• Technology, used correctly, polish this up very nicely. I will probably go back to see it again soon, and looking forward to just enjoying the visuals, which they took full advantage of. - Pro.
• Han Solo getting killed -
  If any actor and character deserve to do a victory lap, and just enjoy playing a character they know well, on film, Harrison Ford and Han Solo do, and this was what this felt like to me.
  
  There were clear times where he seemed to be just reveling in the fact that there he was shooting off his laser, fighting in spaceships, at his age, after all these years. You see other actors that do it, The Lethal Weapon movies after 2, Oceans 11+, Rocky and Rambo, and maybe a little in Indiana Jones.
  
• If they are following in the form of Obiwan for Han, that is fine for me, it was surprising, and made me gasp out loud. The death was not convincing. He could have gone into a vent, like Luke did, or survived in any number of other ways, which is also fine with me. - Pro
  
• Parallel's to Stars Wars (aka A New Hope)
• It starts on the same world, with a cute but different droid than R2D2. They work their way through the galaxy, and in the first big scene, Obiwan/Han dies. It's been long enough since the first offering that this seems both an homage and offering up slightly better chops to keep us guessing. - Pro
  
• Just happening to bump into Han out in space? Yeah, what can you say, it's a small universe, right? - Indifferent - Trekkie level concerns. Some happenstance is necessary for plots.
  
• The switch of Fin - 
• Let's get this straight, he is a lifelong storm trooper, then his buddy gets shot and dies, leaving a red Monster Logo on his helmet so we can track him, and this makes him despise fighting so much he goes to the other side with the very guy that killed his buddy, to whom he professes love not 30 movie minute later? Lazy effort that falls short of even below trekkie level attention - Con
  
• Ray's sudden knowledge of the force -
• Accepting that her brief flashback reveals that Luke was her father and that she has the lineage, how did she immediately adopt the mind control rhythm when never showing it before? - I can accept it.

Avengers 2 - Ultron's Movie treatment

Cleaning up some old drafts where I want to think I made some good points, this was from early last summer. ---
I've now seen Avengers 2 twice, once on the regular screen, then again on Imax 3D.
It holds up.

One thing I noticed in the first showing, in the first scene, the CGI seemed almost purposely ridiculously bad until they got to the compound, did not show up in my second viewing.

What is very clear is that the producer and writer of this are all on the same page. The dialogue is real, the graphics perfect, and the mild work done with the subject matter is done well, with respect to those that are invested in these characters.

Someone gets it.

A voice I never heard from Ultron as I read comics with him in them, James Spader, brought something genuine to the tired, is it pre- or post- Terminator 2 type storyline. Acknowledging that the Ultron saga began far before Terminator, otherwise I think it's a lot of trade offs.

Now, my take on Avengers 2 after initial impressions have faded and or taken hold.

It hasn't held up as well as Avengers 1 or Captain America 2, but I still appreciate it despite using Ultron as the subject matter, and that is because of James Spader, who DID nail it, and yeah the Director gets it all, but Ultron is the most tired of the Marvel themes.

I am very excited about the upcoming Civil War, and many of the other Marvel Projects, hopefully, I will blog about them.

The Emergence of Netflix and other streaming content

Haven't dropped off the planet, even though there haven't been posts here lately, and I haven't failed to notice that the landscape of entertainment has changed drastically, even in the time since my last post.

The relevance of the networks is dropping of the cliff, HBO is the old hand in the game now, and is getting challenged by a company that was busy mailing us videos around the time I started this blog and web entities like Amazon and Hulu that are making surprising pushes themselves.

I'm enjoying it. I was waiting for this fight back in 2008 or so, as network scripting stagnated and nobody was quite sure how to use the new mediums we had. I have an off/on relationship with Netflix over the years, but now watch a lot of it, and still find gems in the forms of series that I can binge watch and maybe later catch in Real time on whatever network they originally started on.

I also realize that Blogs themselves have kind of slipped out of relevance, but for my own use, I plan on making one more run at it with them. Ideas I've had for articles over the last couple years, I've just swallowed, but for the next few weeks or months or until it's again tiring, I will start putting them here again.