Was this in he novelization or deleted scenes? I don't remember any of this from the movie. If true, it would definitely make some sense as to how things got as bad as they did.
We only saw one Star Destroyer from what I recall. And it is hardly super in any way. Its basically the same old Imperial Star Destroyer with the superstructure lengthened to cover most of the ship, and replacing the command tower with a shorter one.
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Han was just having a bit of fun. Personally, I think they still crammed too much into this movie. They could've streamlined it a bit more, condensed some of the locations together. There are too many locations. Really, you could remove Maz & her planet entirely from the movie and not lose anything.
And then you could use that screen time you saved split between having a little more exposition in the opening scene(so we actually cared about Von Sydow's death/knew exactly who he is), and possibly screen time for Captain Phasma, to make her more bad ass.
Han was just having a bit of fun. Personally, I think they still crammed too much into this movie. They could've streamlined it a bit more, condensed some of the locations together. There are too many locations. Really, you could remove Maz & her planet entirely from the movie and not lose anything.
I agree that there was too many set pieces. But I think we needed more time on Maz's planet. That should have been the new saga's cantina. And they could have dug a little deeper in to some of the characters while there. There was character development happening there that furthered the plot, and we needed more of it.
What I would have liked cut was the whole freighter sequence. Comparatively there was nothing here to further the plot, and it was basically just a wink to the audience. The whole smugglers life for Han/Chewie angle could have been achieved in 5 seconds at Maz's planet in a Han shoots first scenario. Providing Abrams with an opportunity to not only throw the finger up at the special editions, but have a wink at the audience, as he loves to do. We didn't need to dedicate 4 minutes to that commentary. And if you really needed to throw a monster in there, you could have done it on Jakku, or Maz's planet.
And then you could use that screen time you saved split between having a little more exposition in the opening scene(so we actually cared about Von Sydow's death/knew exactly who he is), and possibly screen time for Captain Phasma, to make her more bad ass. For example, that whole fight between Finn and random Storm Trooper. It would have been much cooler if that was Phasma, and she kicked Finns butt. I expected her to be totally kick ass. But all she did was have a couple scenes, and finally wilt under duress.
The pacing was not great in my opinion. There was not enough time for me to breath. Usually I don't say a film needs more expository moments, but this one needs it, if anything just to catch our breath. Any time this movie slowed down, 50% of the time it was just slow for slowness sake.
Maybe my perspective on those scenes will change after the entire trilogy comes out, but right now, I feel this film could have improved a lot with what they did, and did not leave on the editing room floor.
I found that freighter sequence jarring personally.
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