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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Gradine" data-source="post: 7706013" data-attributes="member: 57112">The problem is the very existence of "objective truth" is a snipe hunt. People with a presumably better grasp on film-making than you or I have proclaimed Braveheart to be an objectively great movie, no matter how much you or I may find it to be total dreck (and even there, it seems our reasons are different). I think the idea that there are "well" or "poorly" made movies is a complete and utter myth. It's fiction; a total unicorn that people waste too much effort and energy trying to find. I mean, we can laugh about any given Michael Bay movie and the people who go to see them in the theatre but... there's a lot of those people, right? Those movies sell a crapton of tickets. They must be doing something right, no?The thing is, even the things we think of as objective qualities ("good" shot composition, lighting & color theory, action scenes where you can actually follow the freaking action what a concept I mean is that so much to ask, etc.) are only that way because the people in the position to be considered "authorities" have those particular preferences. But again, the Transformers have none of that, and again, millions of people watch and love them. There really is no accounting for taste. Oftentimes it's cultural (see: Warcraft, China) and usually deeply personal and changes over time (hence, why some things we remember loving don't "hold up"). That's not to say that there's not value in discussing differences in taste and opinion, and it's also not to say that there's not value in "objective" film critique either (though I think most people either overstate or understate that value). It's just that filmmaking, even "bad" filmmaking, is art. It's the act of creation. And that will always be dependent on taste.Nope, sorry. Acting is done in real time. Anyone claiming they can analyze acting by looking frame-by-frame is a snake-oil salesman with an agenda. You can look at some of the most well-respected scenes in film history and find some goofy looking stills from them.Again, this goes back to taste, but I found Rey to be one of my favorite film protagonists... period. She's a three-dimensional character and she sells the hell out of it. Quite frankly, Daisy Ridley is a revelation, and I have a sneaking suspicion that a lot those "freeze frame" jokes are at her expense because her facial structure is so different from most young actresses and she's generally just so expressive... but it worked for me. Oscar Isaacs we all know can act well and his only crime in TFA is that's he's underutilized. John Boyega is admittedly the weak link of the three (which is saying a lot, considering how great he is in Attack the Block, but Finn is the farthest thing from that character) but he's having fun and mugging it up and it's hard to not have fun with him. To be fair he is given some of the worst lines ("That is one hell of a pilot!") and most drastic character flips (though still not nearly as much a stretch as the 180's pulled by R1's leads) but I'm still just as excited to see where his character goes next as I am for the rest. And Kylo Ren is the most interesting film Star Wars villain. Not the best, nor the most frightening; neither by a wide margin. But he's conflicted and emotionally-charged in a way prequel-Annie could never hope to pull off. Again, I'm excited to see where they go with his character next.I actually didn't mind Krennic nearly as much as my friends did; I thought he was kind of perfect as the ineffectual ambitious Imperial bureaucrat, and his character only suffered at the very end when they tried to make him a credible threat to basically anyone. No, my issue was with the forced conflict between the two mains, and the complete and unearned character reversals they pull to make them all heroic in the third act. Diego Luna was fine, really, but the material they gave him to work with was... not great. Really, he was the best part of the beginning of the movie but they simply forced Cassian's character growth. Felicity Jones, on the other hand... I don't want to spoil anything, but there's a fairly common human emotion known as "sadness" and an accompanying action known as "crying" that I don't think she has a very strong grasp on. And her character is just all over the map in general. And the way two of them blather on and one about hope... look I know what Episode IV is titled, but maybe a thesaurus would have helped? They just lay it on so thick... And that's to say nothing of the scene-chewing and whatever the hell else Forrest Whittaker thought he was doing, or the underutilized supporting cast, or the criminally underutilized Mads Mikkelsen...I think part of what makes the third act so strong is that by that point nobody really has much left to say except for barking generic action lines, which are hard to mess up, and the droid making quips, and everybody loves the droid so <shrug>. Also, why you gotta throw Dragonheart under the bus? I love the hell out of that dumb, dumb movie. Sean Connery is a dragon! What more do you need? I often refer to it as the best Dennis Quaid movie and the worst Pete Postlethwaite movie ever.I remember reading an old PC Gamer review that said "if we were stranded on a desert island and could only choose one PC game to have with us, we would choose TIE Fighter". This is still one of the truest things I have ever read.</blockquote>

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