[Akalabeth Angel]

Yeah, he's not in the base. He's well outside of it going into his XWing.

Yeah the point is, that despite the full resources of the Empire and being a force user, Vader cannot find Luke. He is only able to confront Luke when Luke chooses to seek him out. Both in ESB and RotJ.  The best he can do is bait him with his friends.

This is a dynamic which is gone in the new movie. The First Order knows where everything is, almost all the time.

They have the original maps. They know the resistance base. They know the key republic worlds and fleet location. They know about the secret map Po wants. They have spies on the smuggler world. They have Informers on Jakku.  Kylo can find Rey on the smuggler world, on Starkiller, can find his father on Starkiller, can sense doubt in Finn, can sense Po in the hills. Random troopers know exactly who Finn is (which is doubly funny given they don't seem to often remove their helmets.). Finn, a janitor, even knows everything there is to know about Starkiller base (except the shield controls, but he knows where to instantly find Captain Phasma). And once he mentions it, the Resistance instantly has scouts there and knows about whether their shield is up or not which they can communicate to Po in hyperspace. The First Order also knows where to find Kylo Ren when he's wounded. Etcetera

People know everything. Nobody has to think.
And as an animator, I can tell that one of the key aspects of making a character seem alive, is giving them time to think.


Having characters know everything also eliminates another factor: suspense.  When the Avenger loses the Falcon, we the audience can wonder what happened to it the same way that Vader and its Captain wonder. And when we are shown, we receive some delight at the surprise. Delight which is undercut by the revelation that a bounty hunter is just as smart and is following him. Then the suspense again. "What is happening? Who shot C3PO? Leia's worried. Oh ****, it's Vader, etcetera."

So instead of the question, can Rey evade the Empire on the smuggler world. Can she hide? We just cut right to "oh ****, there's Kylo out of nowhere, who's going to win the fight?". Let's have action.
Instead of the question, "both the resistance and empire were informed, what will happen?" The Imperials just come and trash the place. And then the resistance trashes the imperials. Until its time for the Imperials to leave at which point the Resistance will completely ignore them and let them get away. Basically just action, a big battle! "wowsers! So cool". Howabout instead a moment where the resistance pilots say "That's Kylo Ren's ship, he's getting away! Let's take it down". We think can Po save the day, kill the bad guy? Will he accidently kill Rey? Will Finn look up, and watch helplessly as the resistance indirectly tries to kill this girl he likes when they attack the Imperial evacuation? No Po's not even going to try. He's had enough showing off for one day and is content with just shooting some soldiers and TIE Fighters. It allows Han and them to have some more action, but at no point will the audience get the chance to worry about what's going on. To feel suspense.

That's the core complaint. A complain which manifests itself in many different ways and many different forms throughout the film. It boils down to a lack of intelligence in the film and a movie, which has great characters and great star wars elements but which as a story is a failure.

[zookeeper]

Which, in turn, can be turned into quite the PLOT HOLE in ESB. If the WHOLE point of Vader going to Hoth was to "capture Luke", why did he pursue the Millenium Falcon in the first place? Why didn't he sense he was not there?

I've always assumed he specifically wanted the Falcon because he knew it was the very recognizable ship used by Luke's friends, who he wanted to use as bait in case Luke would slip away. Also the Falcon really ruined his day in ANH, so he could have marked the ship as a priority target simply because of that.

[Luis Dias]

Oh sure, I'm just using Alakabeth's style of hyperskepticism and hypercriticism to ESB rather than in TFA, which I disagree with, even though I do admit that the imperfections he points to are mostly there in the movie.

Remember, Vader can't run, so why the hell did he go down there? The objective was established, to destroy the energy generator that was creating the deflector shield. Heavy bombardment from space of all the transports that were in PLAIN SIGHT should have followed. Vader should be in space waiting for all the fleeing ships, if Luke's "powerful" he should be able to flee. Check every ship that flees and trace their path.

Instead the only thing he manages to do is losing time by landing and watching one of the last ships going away, and now he has to lose more time getting into a shuttle to board the SSD.

And, as I said, Luke couldn't care **** about that last transport's safety now that the planets' shield is down and there are no Ion cannons to paralize the SDs, and just uses his XWing to go about his own way, unbothered by the imperial fleet upstairs.

Cinematically it works beautifully. The scene where we see the MF getting shot by stormtroopers and Han machinegunning them, finally being able to flee, followed by Vader walking through the rubble which signals the Empire's total victory on this battle, but is just able to watch the MF flee away. Then we see Luke watching it go, it's all very beautiful.

But if you analyse it like I did above, it makes no sense whatsoever.

Let me give you another example. The Millenium Falcon was being searched by a whole fleet. Super Star Destroyers, Destroyers, Tie Fighters, all the shebangs. And yet, Darth Vader finds the time to call half a dozen bounty hunters to track it down. It makes zero sense. And boy were they quick to reach for Vader. More to the point, half a dozen smart pants are not comparable to a whole super fleet by several orders of magnitude. From a storytelling perspective, it makes perfect sense though: it prepares us for the moment when Fett finds the MF because he does not think like the Empire, and his thinking process is much more like Han's, and that's what the filmmaker wanted to relay to the audience: Han Solo tricked the empire but didn't trick a third party (because he wasn't counting on him). But the sequence of events make little sense. And contrast Vader's micro-management with these four or eight bounty hunters with the total carelessness that he watches one of his captains die in front of him (holographically) when one meteor destroys a whole Destroyer.

I could go on. Luke's XWing falls down on Degobah, right? 100 meters or so from Yoda's house. BUT HEY, that was the "Force", right? Or was that JJ Abram's "lack of understanding scale"?

[Akalabeth Angel]

Oh sure, I'm just using Alakabeth's style of hyperskepticism and hypercriticism to ESB rather than in TFA, which I disagree with, even though I do admit that the imperfections he points to are mostly there in the movie.

<snip>

Except almost all of your complaints are about character motivation, a topic which is only really used when a character does something outside of what they normally do.  When they break character.
Incidentally, no one is complaining about character motivation with The Force Awakens, but rather about character knowledge, or lack of information conveyed to the audience, etcetera.

Why did Vader go to Hoth? Because he chose to. It's what he does.  It only doesn't make sense if it's out of character, which it isn't as ANH demonstrates.
Why did he ask for Bounty Hunters? Because he's shown to believes his officers are incompetent and they're not producing results, so he felt it necessary to bring in additional help.

As for movie making.
Movies rely upon the scenes to set things up.

One example, the fleet over Hoth.
We know an Imperial Fleet is in the area of Hoth and wants to attack the Rebels.
This is reinforced by a ship threatening a fleeing transport and previous to that, the rebel pilot briefing.
Then we see the Ion Cannon defeat the Imperial Threat and allow a transport to escape.
At this point, the threat of the Imperial fleet is defeated. We don't need to see this happen again to keep believing they can get away.
The Imperial Fleet remains a non-threat until such time that the movie RE-ESTABLISHES it as a threat.
This threat is re-established when the Falcon is being chased.

You say roughly 'why didn't they blast the transports'? And I say 'show me a star destroy that hasn't been ionized'. Show me that the Ion Cannon is disabled? You can't, that's why the transports not being blasted makes sense, because there's nothing in the movie to re-establish the threat. Incidentally the Falcon being chased not only re-stablishes the threat but also re-focuses it. The threat is no longer against Hoth but instead against the Falcon.

Similarly with the ground assault. The Imperial AT-ATs were to assault the base, and destroy the generator.
Luke and his X-Wing are not at the base. So while his attitude might be a bit too casual, there still is no threat established against that area. We don't hear an Imperial say "sweep the area" or "there's a transport over there, send troops!" etcetera.

The movie tells the story. It establishes antagonists. It establishes means to nullify them, etcetera.

In TFA, in the battle over the smuggler world. The Imperials leave the world completely unmolested by the Resistance X-wings.
This is a problem because it's never established why the Resistance doesn't attack.
The X-wings are a threat to the Imperials, Kylo's ship is an Imperial, therefore the X-wings should remain a threat to him.

All it takes is one line, Po saying "The Imperials are retreating, let them go. Let's secure the area for arrival".  and the movie will make sense.  But because they're too lazy, or too incompetent to do that, the Resistance threat is unresolved and the scene doesn't fully make sense. The audience instead has to create reasons for why they're not being attacked or they lose their suspension of disbelief.

[Scotty]

I'm sorry that you lack the imagination to come up with that on your own, Akalabeth.

I wonder, if we looked through every "if they had just added one or two lines!" complaint, how many dozens of lines would we have to add?

I am happier with a line unspoken than the death of imagination.  Take a look at the end of Interstellar for what happens when you explain everything to the audience, just in case.

[Akalabeth Angel]

I'm sorry that you lack the imagination to come up with that on your own, Akalabeth.

I lacked the imagination to imagine the line I just wrote? Nice logic.

The problem is not that I can't imagine excuses for things not making sense, the problem is that I shouldn't have to.
I'm there to be absorbed by a movie, not to write it.

I wonder, if we looked through every "if they had just added one or two lines!" complaint, how many dozens of lines would we have to add?

It's good to know that you believe the movie has story problems in "dozens" of places, but it is curious that you remain such a staunch defender of a movie which requires pages of audience imagination to make sense.

The problem with the movie is that it's doing too much. There are too many ideas. And as a result those ideas are not adequately explained. Because you're right there isn't time. There isn't time to put in another 15 minutes of movie. What they need to do instead is have a tighter story, overall. This movie basically have ideas from both ANH and RoTJ crammed into two movies plus whatever new they added. There's not enough time for things to make sense because they're trying to two main stories, several subplots, etcetera all at once without even establishing a lot of the backstory.

I am happier with a line unspoken than the death of imagination. 

And I'm happier with better movies.

Take a look at the end of Interstellar for what happens when you explain everything to the audience, just in case.

That isn't one of them.
Furthermore, there is a ton of crap not explained in that movie.

[Luis Dias]

Why did Vader go to Hoth? Because he chose to. It's what he does.  It only doesn't make sense if it's out of character, which it isn't as ANH demonstrates.

Vader is the most efficient and pragmatic antagonist in ANH so I don't understand your reference there. There was no escape from the ambassador ship, so he boarded to find the "ambassador" that happened to be Leia.

Why did he ask for Bounty Hunters? Because he's shown to believes his officers are incompetent and they're not producing results, so he felt it necessary to bring in additional help.

You're making the same scale errors that Abrams did. You shouldn't be able to hide from a whole fleet and lo and behold a lone smuggler does find you no biggie. Nevermind that just after Vader hires these dudes, they do find the MF.

At this point, the threat of the Imperial fleet is defeated. We don't need to see this happen again to keep believing they can get away.
The Imperial Fleet remains a non-threat until such time that the movie RE-ESTABLISHES it as a threat.
This threat is re-established when the Falcon is being chased.

Yes, that is true, cinematically, that is, outside of some critical thought analysis. But if you THINK a little, that idea crashes completely. The Imperial Walkers go to Hoth and their primary target are the power generators, so the "ships can descend". Thus, they should descend. And bombard every single transport there. Ion Cannons of that size are no good without power, which has been shut down. Even if they are not, Tie Bombers would lay the whole field in ruins. Don't tell me a SSD of that size isn't harboring thousands of Tie Bombers.

You say roughly 'why didn't they blast the transports'? And I say 'show me a star destroy that hasn't been ionized'. Show me that the Ion Cannon is disabled? You can't, that's why the transports not being blasted makes sense, because there's nothing in the movie to re-establish the threat. Incidentally the Falcon being chased not only re-stablishes the threat but also re-focuses it. The threat is no longer against Hoth but instead against the Falcon.

Wrong. The point of the Walkers was to destroy the power generator so the fleet could bombard the installation. This is established rightly prior to the murder of Ozzers who foolishly took the fleet out of lightspeed "too close of the system". They take out the generators and now no bombardment occurs, despite their ability to do so.

In TFA, in the battle over the smuggler world. The Imperials leave the world completely unmolested by the Resistance X-wings.
This is a problem because it's never established why the Resistance doesn't attack.
The X-wings are a threat to the Imperials, Kylo's ship is an Imperial, therefore the X-wings should remain a threat to him.

All it takes is one line, Po saying "The Imperials are retreating, let them go. Let's secure the area for arrival".  and the movie will make sense.  But because they're too lazy, or too incompetent to do that, the Resistance threat is unresolved and the scene doesn't fully make sense. The audience instead has to create reasons for why they're not being attacked or they lose their suspension of disbelief.

WTF are you on about, now? It was glaringly obvious they got what they felt they needed, they were in danger so they flew away. "Flying away" from a battlefield isn't a plot hole. Being able to flee XWings who are still engaging other Tie Fighters and so on is not supernatural. This isn't hard to understand.

[Akalabeth Angel]

Yes, that is true, cinematically, that is, outside of some critical thought analysis. But if you THINK a little, that idea crashes completely. The Imperial Walkers go to Hoth and their primary target are the power generators, so the "ships can descend". Thus, they should descend. And bombard every single transport there. Ion Cannons of that size are no good without power, which has been shut down. Even if they are not, Tie Bombers would lay the whole field in ruins. Don't tell me a SSD of that size isn't harboring thousands of Tie Bombers.

You're not analyzing. Analysis of a movie is studying what's IN a movie.
You're fabricating, imagining, introducing your own thoughts into a movie and searching for reason why it doesn't make sense. 

If the movie is inconsistent with your ideas, it's your ideas that are the problem. Whether those are your ideas, or they're from some Star Wars RPG sourcebook or video game.
If the movie is inconsistent with its own internal ideas, or inconsistent with the ideas established in other movies, it's the movie's that's the problem.

[Dragon]

I'm sorry that you lack the imagination to come up with that on your own, Akalabeth.

I lacked the imagination to imagine the line I just wrote? Nice logic.

The problem is not that I can't imagine excuses for things not making sense, the problem is that I shouldn't have to.
I'm there to be absorbed by a movie, not to write it.

The thing is, any movie is going to have things left unexplained (at least explicitly). There is no movie out there which explains every single bit of itself. Some things make sense only within a wider context, which the movie can't always provide. With realistic settings, this isn't noticed, we (well, some of us...) know how our own world works. In fantasy, it's the whole point to let your imagination run rampant and fill in those gaps. Try watching, say, a romantic comedy while imagining (I know, not an easy task for you) that you're an alien from outer space and don't know how things work on Earth. Stop taking our world from granted and see how much you'll get from the movie. This is the "natural" level of explanation you get. Fantasy, of course, has to ramp that up somewhat (or we wouldn't know WTF is going on. There are movies like that), while genuine SF might need to work in an explicit explanation of the science being used (not unrealistic, this tends to happen IRL as soon as you have a scientist and a layperson in the same room with a device the latter doesn't understand), but this has to be limited, as explaining every departure, every detail that is different from our world would bog any movie down, especially as high fantasy (of which SW is a member) takes place in what is essentially a different universe.

"Standalone" fantasy movies simply require imagination from the viewer to fill in the gaps. Sometimes explanations are readily provided in supplementary material (with  the old SW, you had heaps of the stuff), but I don't always like it since it may clash with my interpretation of events. Movies based on books almost always have things that one can only understand by reading the book (in which you can have more long-winded explanations, but even there it's possible to overdo). A novel can delve into explaining everything it needs (but in most cases leaves visuals to imagination), but a movie just isn't going to hand you everything on a silver platter.

[Akalabeth Angel]

I'm sorry that you lack the imagination to come up with that on your own, Akalabeth.

I lacked the imagination to imagine the line I just wrote? Nice logic.

The problem is not that I can't imagine excuses for things not making sense, the problem is that I shouldn't have to.
I'm there to be absorbed by a movie, not to write it.

The thing is, any movie is going to have things left unexplained (at least explicitly). There is no movie out there which explains every single bit of itself. Some things make sense only within a wider context, which the movie can't always provide.

This argument is a fallacy and the premise is unprovable.
So why not discuss only the movie at hand, shall we?

[karajorma]

As I suspected, you are in fact using the phrase "plot hole" incorrectly.  A plot hole is not something which leaves the viewer with a question, a plot hole is a logical inconsistency within a story.  If the answer to the question "why" is not explicitly stated in the movie, that does not make it a plot hole.  If something happens that logically could not happen based on other events in the story, that's a plot hole.

The problem is that no one asks these questions. That's the plot hole. You could literally remove the word map from the script and replace it with McGuffin. It makes no sense that not one single person in the film had any questions about the map! It is completely unbelievable that not one person in the film has questions about that map. THAT is the plot hole.

The story group’s thinking went back to the 1977 original movie, when R2-D2 accessed the Empire’s mainframe as the heroes searched for the captured Princess Leia. “We had the idea about R2 plugging into the information base of the Death Star, and that’s how he was able to get the full map and find where the Jedi temples are,” Arndt said.

Abrams says he chose to spell this out indirectly in the movie because he didn’t want the story to get bogged down in “how **** happened 30 years ago.”

If the Empire had a full map 30 years ago, why do the First Order now have a map with the exact same missing piece that the resistance have? Especially if we're claiming that the First Order found their copy by going through the Empire's records rather than some method where they got the map from R2D2's copy. The only explanation would be that BOTH copies had a missing section. In which case, the real question is where the **** did the missing piece come from?

Can't you see that this explanation actually explains nothing? Can't you see that this is yet more of the same kind of lazy scriptwriting I've been complaining about?

As I've pointed out, nothing in the original trilogy annoys me enough that it pulls me out of the film. None of the nitpicks that people keep mentioning in this thread slap you across the face and say "This was lazy scriptwriting." In TFA I saw tonnes of examples. And the problem is that most of them were completely unnecessary.

Watch them again on Blu-ray. You'll probably change your mind.  There's a ridiculous number of things I'm noticing now that irk me just as much as anything in TFA.

Do you really think someone who would reference the original films the number of times I have in this thread wouldn't have watched the original trilogy recently? Seriously it just didn't happen. At no point in any of those films did I get annoyed by lazy scriptwriting. And I doubt I would have even if it was the first time I'd ever seen Star Wars. 

Admittedly I'm watching the original theatrical release. I refuse to watch Special Edition ever again for the same reasons I probably won't ever watch the prequels again.

One point I mentioned earlier in the thread and kind of got left hanging was plot-line relevance.  ANH isn't bad, and ROTJ is pretty solid as well, but TESB has a solid half-hour of Vader pursuing the Falcon and Han and Leia that is totally irrelevant to the overall story.  From the moment they left Hoth to the moment they arrive in Bespin is a foray that is supposed to flesh out their "love story" but really doesn't.

And you're acting like I'm the one nitpicking? It's not just fleshing out the love story, it's giving Luke some time to do stuff with Yoda. If they'd arrived immediately on Bespin there wouldn't have been time for any of the great Yoda training scenes. We also get time for a whole bunch of Vader exposition. Besides, I don't agree with your interpretation that it goes nowhere. We get to see how conflicted Leia is about being with Han. We hadn't really seen that before.

And even if I did agree you're right and that it goes nowhere, so what? It was entertaining in its own right.

I guess the reason I really don't understand the hate some people are throwing at TFA is that the OT is by no means a masterpiece of tight writing, character development, or acting.  They are good, entertaining movies that occupy a warm place in my thoughts, but the more criticism I read of TFA, the more I think it's driven half by rose-coloured-nostalgic glasses and half by a dislike of Abrams in general (who I actually don't mind at all).

And the more I read from people defending TFA the more I believe I'm hearing the opinions of abused children who are simply glad that their new step-dad doesn't beat them too. It's like everyone is so glad that TFA isn't a bad film that they don't want to allow it to be criticised.

Look, even if the OT were not great films, merely good, why does that preclude us from pointing out the rather large flaws in this film? Why is OT the only metre stick we are allowed to measure it against? After all, Abrams had the benefit of being able to watch the OT and not repeat their mistakes. Star Wars basically invented the blockbuster film and the concept was still new when Empire Strikes Back came out. But TFA has the benefit of more than 30 years of blockbusters to draw on and it is still making stupid rookie mistakes. Mistakes which I would STILL call it out on if it was the first film of its franchise. Why are you so determined to let it skate on them that you're willing to make (frankly unfair) comparisons to a film which is 30 years older?

You challenged people to find plot holes in the film which weren't based on the original trilogy but every reply to a criticism has been "But the OT did that too" So what? Why aren't you willing to judge TFA against modern films and see that in that respect its over-reliance on coincidence would still knock off a couple of marks?

Although there is a huge plot hole in ESB. We never get why Vader simply goes away when Luke lets himself fall down. Vader is a corpse in motion, he should know that the Force is something that keeps you alive. He already sensed Luke's presence very well. Why did he waste time to get to his SuperStarDestroyer instead of making a search for the body himself? I never fully swallowed that part.

I've always assumed that Luke's decision to fall showed Vader that he couldn't turn him the way he'd been attempting to do it. Had he gone after Luke, it would have resulted in Luke's death and he didn't want that. Luke had already chosen death over turning to the Dark Side. He'd survived the fall on bare luck. Had Vader gone after Luke, he'd simply have jumped off the antenna.

If he captures Luke's friends too though Luke won't simply commit suicide. Vader would have more of a chance to turn him.

It's just the sheer laziness of the film that annoys me. Sometimes it doesn't even make sense. The scene where Finn battles with a random stormtrooper the first time he uses a lightsabre... they actually HAVE a character who does have a motivation to have that battle with Finn and yet for some reason I can't fathom that battle ISN'T with Captain Phasma.

Seriously, why? 

This bugged the crap out of me too. Seeing all the attention memetic stormtrooper "TR-8R" is getting just makes me more upset at the lost potential here.

I swear one day we're going to hear a story about how Gwendoline Christie was ill that day and said "Can't I just shoot him you just use a random stormtrooper instead?"

[Scourge of Ages]

I would say that one of the big reasons why people (some here) are so annoyed by the problems with the film is that we care about the SW universe a lot. And it's because we have been so deeply affected by the OT and by the prequels. Now hear me out!

"The Phantom Menace" was in 1999 the second highest grossing movie ever, not adjusted for inflation. It is still #7 (source); it just barely edged out the original "Star Wars". People, in general, expected amazing things from the movie. It was the expectation and excitement that we felt that drove it to make so much money. But after the newness wore off, we realized just how terrible it was, and it has since been rightly torn apart by reviewers of all sorts. It was a massive disappointment to fans of the original trilogy.

"The Force Awakens" is currently the highest grossing movie ever, and it's still playing in theaters. People, in general, expected TFA to be at least good. And it was good! But after that, we realized how close it was to being great, which just gave us flashbacks of the disappointment we felt at Ep1. The investment that we have in the universe, and the thrill that it was actually pretty good combine to make the disappointment just that much more bitter. And that's why we pick at the easily fixable problems that we see.

And on a side note: I saw "The 5th Wave", in theater, on Saturday. It was bad. There is not going to be a thread about it on this forum, because I doubt that anybody actually cares enough to debate anything about it. There are (probably) multiple extremely heated threads on whatever forum(s) is/are devoted to the book series it was based on, because those people definitely care very much about that universe.

tl;dr: We don't hate good things here, but the disappointment with something bad (or merely "good") is always stronger the more you care about it almost being good (or even great).

[Scotty]

As I suspected, you are in fact using the phrase "plot hole" incorrectly.  A plot hole is not something which leaves the viewer with a question, a plot hole is a logical inconsistency within a story.  If the answer to the question "why" is not explicitly stated in the movie, that does not make it a plot hole.  If something happens that logically could not happen based on other events in the story, that's a plot hole.

The problem is that no one asks these questions. That's the plot hole. You could literally remove the word map from the script and replace it with McGuffin. It makes no sense that not one single person in the film had any questions about the map! It is completely unbelievable that not one person in the film has questions about that map. THAT is the plot hole.

What the hell kind of questions are they going to ask?  "What's this map for?" is answered pretty readily by "it's a map to Luke Skywalker" which is explained
A) by Poe to Finn as they escape

               POE
           That droid's got a map that leads
           straight to Luke Skywalker!

                          FINN
           Oh, you gotta be kidding me! I--

B) by Finn to Rey

FINN
           Apparently he's carrying a map that
           leads to Luke Skywalker, and
           everyone's after it.
          She turns to him, concerned, curious. And asks:

                          REY
           Luke Skywalker? I thought he was a
           myth.

C) By Finn to Han

FINN
           He's carrying a map to Luke Skywalker.
          Yup: Han stops in his tracks.

                          FINN (CONT'D)
           You are the Han Solo that fought
           with the Rebellion. You knew him.

"Where's the rest of the map?" which is explained by
A)C-3P0 to Leia (this one neatly answers the "what did they plan to do if it failed" question again, in case you were keeping track.

C-3PO
           General, I regret to inform you, but
           this map recovered from BB-8 is only
           partially complete. And even worse,
           it matches no charted system on
           record. We simply do not have enough
           information to locate Master Luke.

                          LEIA
           I can't believe I was so foolish to
           think that I could just find Luke
           and bring him home.

What other questions could you possibly have that you want them to bother answering?  "Why is the First Order after the map?"  Because they want to find Luke to and/or stop the Resistance from finding Luke.  "Why is the map incomplete in the first place?"  Who cares?  Even if you do, Luke split it up in order to hide his tracks so not just anyone could follow him.

I continue to find your declaration of plot holes wanting.

[NGTM-1R]

This argument is a fallacy and the premise is unprovable.

Bull****. He's describing one of the fundamentals of storytelling; conservation of detail.

The fact you would say this is one of those WTF moments on a par with Maslo declaring that releasing finished games on time is bad.

[swashmebuckle]

I guess the reason I really don't understand the hate some people are throwing at TFA is that the OT is by no means a masterpiece of tight writing, character development, or acting.  They are good, entertaining movies that occupy a warm place in my thoughts, but the more criticism I read of TFA, the more I think it's driven half by rose-coloured-nostalgic glasses and half by a dislike of Abrams in general (who I actually don't mind at all).

While the writing, character development, and acting of A New Hope are not virtuosic, they do all serve the movie as a whole (oftentimes by staying out of the way of other things), and I would certainly argue that ANH as a whole is a masterpiece.

The Force Awakens has lots of superficial and stylistic elements that have been picked apart and attacked here and which are not really that interesting to me, and it also has real structural weakness which I think is interesting and worth discussing, but I don't think either of those things are what really gets people worked up about it.

For me, the real issue is that ANH actually is a genuine masterpiece, a work of incredible imagination and auteurship, and above all an honest try at doing something new. TFA is a movie helmed by a hand-picked company guy who really loves the original and wants to do a kind of grand tribute using its intellectual property, but above all it's an exercise for the biggest studio in the world in wringing every cent out of their investment, with the promise of another one every year until we all die. The problem is that you can't get what made ANH special by trying to replicate it like this. ANH is filmmakers with crazy ideas and limited resources shooting the moon. TFA is filmmakers with no ideas and unlimited resources shooting fish in a barrel. The result is a movie that looks and tastes like the real thing, but underneath we know it's just going through the motions with no inspiration of its own.

If you don't recognize the excellence behind ANH, then it's easy to construct a viewing context in which TFA seems like the better of two silly adventure movies (though I would still argue against you based on the aforementioned structural problems). If you do appreciate what makes ANH special though, then it's equally easy to feel like we've all been completely duped by the impostor TFA. And holy crap, when you feel like you've been had, EVERYTHING gets interpreted through the lens of that feeling: all the little references to the originals feel like shameless pandering and fan service, all the contrivances and omissions that are normally not a problem in any movie become clear evidence of laziness or cynicism, and anyone who enjoyed the movie must have been dropped on their head or something.

I'm looking forward to seeing TFA again (in proper 2D this time) partly because it has generated such a variety of responses here. It will be interesting to see what sticks and what has just been knee jerk disdain or blind puppy love.

[karajorma]

What other questions could you possibly have that you want them to bother answering?

WHERE IS THE ****ING MAP FROM! It's the McGuffin of the entire film and that is neither answered NOR even questioned.

I've been asking that question over and over and you continue to repeat the same superficial answers from the film even though I've already explained why they don't actually explain anything. This is now the 2nd time you've danced around that question rather than answering it.

[Mammothtank]

Is the director that has been put in charge of the next movies any good? I haven't heard of him before. I hope that he learn's from the various flaws in this film and makes the next one it's own movie. Has he made any movies that I should have heard of?

[Akalabeth Angel]

Is the director that has been put in charge of the next movies any good? I haven't heard of him before. I hope that he learn's from the various flaws in this film and makes the next one it's own movie. Has he made any movies that I should have heard of?

His biggest claim to fame is Looper. Which was decent if a bit overrated.

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0426059/?ref_=tt_ov_dr

[Mammothtank]

Oh yeah I've seen that. It didn't mind that movie.

[Luis Dias]

Yes, that is true, cinematically, that is, outside of some critical thought analysis. But if you THINK a little, that idea crashes completely. The Imperial Walkers go to Hoth and their primary target are the power generators, so the "ships can descend". Thus, they should descend. And bombard every single transport there. Ion Cannons of that size are no good without power, which has been shut down. Even if they are not, Tie Bombers would lay the whole field in ruins. Don't tell me a SSD of that size isn't harboring thousands of Tie Bombers.

You're not analyzing. Analysis of a movie is studying what's IN a movie.
You're fabricating, imagining, introducing your own thoughts into a movie and searching for reason why it doesn't make sense. 

If the movie is inconsistent with your ideas, it's your ideas that are the problem. Whether those are your ideas, or they're from some Star Wars RPG sourcebook or video game.
If the movie is inconsistent with its own internal ideas, or inconsistent with the ideas established in other movies, it's the movie's that's the problem.

I'm not fabricating anything. The empire's initial plan was to bombard the hell out of the Hoth's base, a plan curtailed by Ozzie's "clumsiness and stupidity":

Field captain destroys the power generators. Why? What is the point if they were already defeating ground troops? The whole point was basic: shield protects from "any heavy bombardment", therefore destroy shields. What should have followed was "heavy bombardment", and yet we see the last transport going away like's no biggie.