The Road to Level 40

The latest Pokémon GO special event has just concluded.  I had carefully calculated my XP gains so that I would reach level 40 late this morning.  Due to a miscalculation in my grinding schedule I hit level 40 late last night instead, unexpectedly after a binge evolution session gained me slightly more XP than I had planned on.

Events continue to be the only time I seriously play the game.  The rest of the time I am merely catching a few Pokémon and spinning a few stops to keep my streaks alive.  If Niantic were a little quicker in implementing quests I may be more apt to fire up the app during regular play.

When Pokémon GO first came out there was a sight with a calculator to estimate when you would reach level 40.  My estimation was mid 2019.  My grinding sessions over the past nearly two years must have really paid off.

There are people who hit level 40 mere months after the game was released.  It has been a long road but it’s pretty satisfying to finally be at he final level.  I am regularly in raid groups with people I see out all the time that are still in the mid 30s so knowing how much they play underscores the achievement of hitting level 40.

After all this time, here are my achievement medals and stats after hitting level 40:

Start Date: 7/9/2016
Total XP: 20010070
Medals
Jogger: 1,698.2 km
Kanto: 147
Collector: 29,678
Scientist: 5,226
Breeder: 1,003
Backpacker: 21,230
Youngster: 310
Pikachu Fan: 436
Johto: 98
Berry Master: 2,030
Gym Leader: 5,566
Hoenn: 103
Fisherman: 97/300
Battle Girl: 950/1000
Ace Trainer: 252/1000
Battle Legend: 108/1000
Unown: 6/10
Champion: 90/100
Schoolkid: 12,797
Black Belt: 291
Bird Keeper: 8,787
Punk Girl: 7,512
Ruin Maniac: 1,327
Hiker: 988
Bug Catcher: 5,488
Hex Maniac: 1,208
Depot Agent: 332
Kindler: 1,328
Swimmer: 5,182
Gardener: 2,737
Rocker: 1,014
Psychic: 2,687
Skier: 1,030
Dragon Tamer: 242
Delinquent: 785
Fairy Tale Girl: 983

I even finally retired my buddy, the Pidgey who had been my companion through all of level 39.  The need for Pidgey candy for grinding is now taking a backseat to finishing off my Pokédex.

I run into a lot of people who take months off then come back.  I guess the key is that I have played the game every day since it was released in July of 2016.  Sometimes it’s for ten minutes.  Today, for example, I have barely played as I take a break from the week long grind to complete level 39.  Other days, like yesterday, I’m opening the app every ten or fifteen minutes to get some valuable XP.

On Monday, only a few weeks before he was about to leave the game, I finally caught my first Rayquaza.  It was a little more difficult than normal given that everyone’s pretty sick of Rauquaza after a week.  Luckily there were some people grinding that were just there for the XP.

On Wednesday, my last full day of level 39, I randomly encountered my first ever Dragonite in the wild.  I nearly got him with my GO plus as I wasn’t really paying attention at the time.  I’ve never used a tracker to hunt down Dragonites and I had thought I’d never run into one.  I remember the odds of this were calculated somewhere around 1:1,000,000 so I was pretty psyched, even though I’ve evolved more than enough for my needs.  On top of running into it he ended up having very good IVs.  Even if he was 32 CP I would have kept him, excited to finally run into a wild one for the first time.

After hoping we’d get a bit of a legendary break it was announced yesterday that Lugia was coming back.  This wasn’t terribly exciting.  I have plenty so I was excited to have a break from all this raiding.  Then came the news today that there will be shiny Lugia.  Whether they are all shiny I am not sure at this point but it looks like  I will not be getting a break after all.

Back to the grind.

Gustav Holst’s “The Planets” (8-bit Cover Album)

 

The Planets was written by Gustav Holst between 1914 and 1916.  There is a piece for each planet (except Earth) that had been discovered at the time.  Pluto had not yet been discovered or reclassified as a dwarf planet.

I discovered this work of music when it was explained to me that it was likely a heavy influence for the soundtrack of Star Wars.  It doesn’t take too long into “Mars, the Bringer of War” to see the merit in this assessment.  It’s a wonderful piece of music and I found myself listening to it quite a bit in my early teens.  It’s based more on astrology than astronomy, hence the order of the tracks.

I found that classical pieces lend themselves really well to the 8-bit format.  In fact, there are so many instruments playing at once (far more than the NES would be able to handle) that it blends together so much you almost lose the 8-bit quality of the music.

Click above to listen on YouTube or .  . .

Download Gustav Holst’s “The Planets” (8-bit Cover Album) on Google Play

Ozzy Osbourne’s “Diary of a Madman” (8-bit Cover Album)

Randy Rhoads made two studio albums with Ozzy Osbourne before his unfortunate death in 1982.  The second of these albums was 1981’s Diary of a Madman.  In my opinion this album always edged out Ozzy’s first solo album, The Blizzard of Ozz, released earlier the same year.  To me the last three tracks of this album were the pinnacle of classic early Ozzy, all made possible by the incredible guitar work of Randy Rhoads.  The album ends in epic fashion with a choir singing along to the syncopated 6/8 rhythm of the guitars, reminiscent of Ozzy’s classic opening theme: O Fortuna.  Ozzy is a ridiculous, silly man as can be learned from simply looking at almost any of his album covers, but put together with the right musical ensemble he is behind some of my favorite early heavy metal titles.

Click above to listen on YouTube or .  . .

Download Ozzy Osbourne’s “Diary of a Madman” (8-bit Cover Album) on Google Play

Red Hot Chili Peppers’s “Blood Sugar Sex Magic” (8-bit Cover Album)

Unintentionally moving ahead a year chronologically comes 1991’s Blood Sugar Sex Magic by The Red Hot Chili Peppers.  This is another hugely influential album to me.  I found doing an 8-bit version of a metal album fairly easy but trying to fit a funkier feel into the limitations of 8-bit was a little more challenging.  This is another of my all time favorite albums.  Not every song stands on its own but as an album everything fits together and flows perfectly from start to finish.  Some songs were harder than others.  “Apache Rose Peacock” is still not perfect and there are a few imperfections in “My Lovely Man.”  I am working on cleaning up both for the Google Play release.

Click above to listen on YouTube or .  . .

Download Red Hot Chili Peppers’s “Blood Sugar Sex Magik” (8-bit Cover Album) on Google Play

Star Wars: The Last Jedi (In Conclusion)

My feelings about The Last Jedi remain complex.  There are parts of it that I really liked and enjoyed.  There are parts of it that were deeply disappointing.  There were parts that were incredibly beautiful.  There were parts that were just dumb.

The main problem with the prequels was in their direction and construction.  You had some exceptional actors who put in good performances and you had some good actors who put in lackluster performances.  The problem with them was George Lucas.  I have a deep and abiding love and respect for George Lucas.  After all, he gave us these wonderful stories to begin with.  That being said, many people need a collaborator, someone to balance them out.  There’s a reason that The Beatles were better than Paul McCartney or John Lennon left to their own devices.

The reason the original trilogy movies are so strong despite their flaws is because George Lucas then wasn’t George Lucas now.  While he was a well known up and coming filmmaker he was not yet revered as a god.  People challenged him.  People assisted him.  People said no to him.  Great writers assisted him with scripts.  Great directors assisted him with direction.  Great editors pieced together what he had created.  The fabric of the story and mythology of Star Wars is indisputably strong.  This is why it’s more popular than ever after 40 years.  This is why my two-year-old son came home from school one day and identified Darth Vader from a picture before I’d ever shown him the movie.  The characters and the events that happen in the movies are iconic.

George Lucas put together every facet of the prequel movies and the result is a jumbled mess.  On the surface, the story of the three movie arc isn’t bad.  A young Anakin is introduced to the Force, joins the Jedi order, falls in love with a marries a Queen, goes into battle during the Clone Wars, is ultimately seduced by the dark side of the Force, turns on his beloved mentor and friend, and becomes Darth Vader.  That story could be told in a very compelling way but a lot of the issues come in how the characters get from point A to point B.  In 1975 someone may have suggested starting Anakin as a young adult (for a number of reasons), or not introducing concepts such as midichlorians, or having a consistent villain throughout the trilogy that we could learn about rather than introducing and subsequently killing off one or two in each film.

George Lucas can be seen in behind the scenes footage creating a sterile environment where he can just get the scenes shot against a green screen and move on.  I get it.  I feel the same way about certain aspects of the creative process.  There are parts that I love and parts that are a chore.  The things is all the parts need to be done and done well.  When you’re talking about movies with budgets in the hundreds of millions of dollars you can hire people to do the things you don’t love and to do them well.  You just have to let go.  You can’t control everything.  Marcia Lucas, Irvin Kershner, Lawrence Kasdan, these are people that helped make the original trilogy great.  They or their equivalents were absent in the prequels and it shows.

The new trilogy addresses these issues.  There is more input.  There is more collaboration.  The stories seem better thought out even with their evident problems.  Every story has problems, it’s about having few enough that they can be overlooked.  So far I feel that a lot of the new trilogy’s problems can be overlooked.

There are a lot of people saying that The Last Jedi killed Star Wars.  I think that’s a bit of an overstatement.  Star Wars will never die.  To stick with the analogy of The Beatles, The Yellow Submarine was a pretty disappointing album.  It didn’t kill The Beatles.  Artists can have peaks and valleys.  The prequels were a valley.  The new films could be viewed as a new peak.  Maybe not a peak as soaring or majestic as The Empire Strikes Back, but a peak nonetheless.

Looking throughout the history of this franchise (and any franchise, really) you’ll find people claiming its death.  Just like with bands, people discover a band, get into it, the band gets popular, then a cutoff occurs where the fan claims the band is not as good anymore.  There’s no truth to this, it’s completely subjective.  I was really into Metallica in my early teens, then I said they sold out with the release of The Black Album.  Kids in my high school claimed they’d done so earlier with the release of … And Justice For All by having the audacity of releasing their first music video.  What sell outs!

You can read reviews of The Empire Strikes Back from shortly after its release and see that it was received with mixed reviews.  It’s practically unthinkable after nearly four decades.  For the vast majority of my life this movie has been widely accepted in the community as the best.  In this New York Times review from June of 1980 the writer, Vincent Canby, states:

“Gone from ‘The Empire Strikes Back’ are those associations that so enchanted us in ‘Star Wars,’ reminders of everything from the Passion of Jesus and the stories of Beowulf and King Arthur to those of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, the Oz books, Buck Rogers and Peanuts. Strictly speaking, ‘The Empire Strikes Back’ isn’t even a complete narrative. It has no beginning or end, being simply another chapter in a serial that appears to be continuing not onward and upward but sideways.”

The review goes on with various vicious stabs at what is considered so sacred by fans.  I would guess the writer was vastly older than many of us when he saw the first movie and followed it up with the second.  I am also vastly less critical of The Return of the Jedi than people that were ten years older then me when they saw it.

The Last Jedi, and in some smaller way The Force Awakens did kill Star Wars for me in a way.  What they killed in me was the investment.  I went into both films with low to no expectations.  I emerged from The Force Awakens happy and filled with hope.  I emerged from The Last Jedi a bit disappointed for all the reasons I outlined in my review.  The prequels had beaten most of the hope out of me so my investment was low.  I didn’t see a single trailer for either movie and had no idea what to expect.  After watching The Last Jedi a second time I did like it a lot more.  The beauty of so much of it balanced out some of the frustration I had with the story and characters.

When Timothy Zahn began releasing his famous Thrawn Trilogy in 1990 I remember that feeling of reading stories of Han, Luke, and Leia again.  Seeing, or reading, about these characters back in action against a new set of foes was incredible.  It’s probably hard for anyone ten years younger than me to understand what it was like at the time.  We had the three movies, some comic books which essentially told the same story, some BBC radio dramas which again told the same story, then we had Splinter of the Mind’s Eye which was a throwaway novel that served as a fallback script for the sequel if Star Wars bombed.  It didn’t and Splinter was cast aside only to be read by die hard fans.  The only other thing that existed outside of all of that was The Star Wars Holiday Special but that only existed in schoolyard rumors and legends.  No one had actually seen it and if they had no one had a recording.  Only have the internet sprung into existence did it start to take form and did we as fans get a chance to see it.  It turns out we weren’t missing much.

So when the Thrawn Trilogy was released it was exhilarating to see our old heroes back in action again.  There hadn’t been anything like it.  I remember watching the end of Return of the Jedi with tears welling up in my eyes and an aching in my heart wanting nothing more than to know what happened next.  What happened to our heroes?

People just slightly younger than me can’t comprehend this.  Why?  Because I can’t even begin to list the TV shows, comics, video games, and novels that have happened since.  There has to be hundreds, if not thousands, of outlets for those yearning to spend more time in this universe.  In the mid 1980s we were just left for nearly ten years wondering what happened until those books came out.  It was the better part of twenty years until the prequels were released.  I’d spent the majority of my life until that point formulating my own ideas for them, part of why they were so disappointing.

With the new trilogy I wasn’t very curious about Han, Luke, and Leia.  I knew what happened to them.  At least I thought I did from the dozen or so novels I read in the expanded universe before I tired of it.  These new movies took place so much farther in the future than the Thrawn Trilogy that it was conceivable that they did exist in the same universe with the exception of Han and Leia’s progeny.

People are saying that The Last Jedi killed Star Wars.  People have said that everything that has happened since the original movie was released has killed the franchise.  And every movie franchise.  And every book series.  And every set of albums by a band.  This has always happened and this will always happen.

While I respect people’s opinions I do find it hard to follow the logic that leads people to believe that this is the specific thing that “killed” Star Wars.  I can’t see how someone would look past the Star Wars Holiday Special, Caravan of Courage, The Battle for Endor, The Phantom Menace, The Attack of the Clones, The Revenge of the Sith, and somehow pinpoint this single moment as the moment Star Wars died.

Star Wars is not dead and it never will be.

I had my problems with this movie but we’ve had nearly twenty years to process what happened with the prequel trilogy and I have processed my disappointment so that I’m at a place where I can just enjoy being immersed in the universe again with a lower level of commitment.  What happens happens.  There will be varying levels of quality within the franchise.

What seems to be happening with these movies is that we’re saying goodbye to the original characters.  Future films will likely not have R2-D2 and C-3PO shoehorned into them.  We probably won’t see Chewbacca or the Millennium Falcon.  The Skywalkers will be gone and we can move on to see other things and meet new characters.

The thing I liked about The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi is that was that we were saying goodbye to the characters from the original trilogy.  The Force Awakens was Han Solo’s big goodbye.  We spent more time with him than any of the original characters and we said goodbye.  It was painful but it needed to be done.

The Last Jedi was Luke’s chance to do the same.  It wasn’t quiet as painful as Han’s goodbye and I didn’t really feel it was necessary but we did it an Luke is gone even if he may return as a Force ghost at some point.  I’m just sad that Leia won’t get the chance to do the same.  Episode IX should have been her movie, her chance to shine.  She had a big part in The Last Jedi but it wasn’t about her, it was about Luke.  I don’t know if there is enough scrapped footage or CGI that can change that.

The Last Jedi is not the movie I was expecting, however, the more I think about the better I feel about it overall.  I don’t see the perfect movie so many other fans saw and I certainly don’t see it as the franchise destroyer that others saw.  To me it was a mildly disappointing movie with some truly incredible parts in it.  While I wasn’t excited about this movie I do look forward to seeing it a third time when it is released on DVD.  I am also really looking forward to the new trilogy directed by Rian Johnson.

There’s one thing I’m sure of: this trilogy of trilogies is getting tired.  I look forward to a bold new direction for the Star Wars franchise in the future.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi (Part 15)

After Luke reveals himself to be tricking Kylo Ren we cut back to Ahch-to where Luke is shown struggling to perform this new Jedi Force Projection trick that Kylo Ren alluded to earlier in the movie.  Kylo Ren reveals that by merely doing this trick you could die and Luke does just that.

We see Luke stare off into the distance at two suns.  We don’t know for sure if these are Ahch-to’s two suns or if it’s some sort of hallucination the boring miserable planet that Luke hated being on for the first twenty years of his life.  Either way it is a beautifully shot scene and call back to the original Star Wars movie.

Immediately both Rey and Leia seem to feel Luke’s passing.  There is not a lot of grief, mostly just calm reflection by both of them.

I’m not sure I really like this end for Luke Skywalker.  I can understand that what he did must’ve been some pretty advanced level Force use but how and why did it kill him?    I’m not sold on the fact that Luke needed to die, at least not in this manner.  If he truly wanted to help out, much like Holdo, wouldn’t he have been of much more use alive?

If Luke had died selflessly to protect Rey, Leia, or whoever else needed protection by sacrificing himself that would have seemed more necessary.  I just have a very hard time wrapping my head around why this would have happened this way.  Why does Luke, who always rushed to his friends’ side and believed in the redemption of anyone turn into someone who abandons his friends and loses faith in his own nephew at the first sign of straying to the dark side.

Seeing Luke die is tough.  It’s less jarring than the death of Han Solo but it is still tough.  Tougher, however, is seeing who Luke has become.  Han and Leia have not changed all that much.  They’re both the same people they’ve always been, just sadder.  Luke seems to go against everything that he ever stood for in the original movies.  The question remains: why?  Because of that one time he failed?  That seems like a really weak reason even for a young Luke Skywalker who was no stranger to whining.  That one failure just makes him say, “Okay, I’m done with that.”  Then he walks away from it all and allows Kylo Ren to just kill everyone?

And why does Luke die?  Is the exertion of this projection task just so much that it will kill anyone?  Does he die just because he feel like it and he’s had enough?  When Yoda dies you get the feeling he was just using the Force to extend his life to help Luke.  Luke is roughly 850 years younger than Yoda.

After Luke’s death Kylo Ren storms the base and makes eye contact with Rey just as she about to fly off in the Millennium Falcon.  Along with her flies off the possibility of there being a real lightsaber battle in this movie.  Kylo Ren finds the dice from the Millennium Falcon and picks them up only to see them disappear in his hands.  This leaves me with a lot of questions about how Luke’s whole Force Projection trick works.

On board the rebel ship Poe meets Rey for the first time and they have to comment on it because I don’t think any viewers of the two movies realize it until it’s brought up.

Star Wars Episode VIII The Last Jedi screen grab

Finn goes into a drawer to get blankets for Rose and we see that Rey has stolen all the Jedi texts in a final act to really piss off the Force nuns.

Rey asks Leia, “How do we rebuild from this?”

Leia responds, “We have everything we need.”

The camera then falls back and we see everyone chatting, smiling, and laughing as if it were the end of The Return of the Jedi.  It’s unclear why anyone is doing anything other than suffering from intense levels of dread and despair.  Nothing has gone right for the Resistance and they’ve been cut down to about two dozen people at this point.  Things are bleak.  We all like an underdog story but unless some of those bums they were trying to call to help them on Crait show up it’s going to be impossible to believe any story line that leads this group to victory against the hugely powerful First Order.

The movie ends with the slaves back on Canto Bight.  We see a little boy use the force to bring a broom to his hand, something that would make Master Obi-Wan “very grumpy.”  We’re left to believe that the Force can be used by anyone, a bit of a departure from the genetically passed down Force trends of previous movies.  This is why Rey’s parents don’t matter.  This is, apparently, the hope Leia may be referring to.

Personally, I’m thinking they can’t wait for the slave kid with the broom to grown up.  They’re going to need to do some pretty intense planning before we can hope for a happy ending to Episode IX.

Next up: In Conclusion . . .

 

 

Megadeth’s “Rust in Peace” (8-bit Cover Album)

Megadeth’s 1990 album was one of the first CDs I ever purchased.  I remember seeing a commercial for the upcoming album on “Headbanger’s Ball” where they played the palm-muted interlude toward the end of the song with a strobing image of the fallout shelter symbol.  The second I heard it I prepared to purchase the album the day it came out.  I had liked previous Megadeth recordings but was primarily a Metallica fan at he time (don’t judge me).  This album quickly turned me in a primary Megadeth fan and to this day remains, in my opinion, the greatest metal album of all time.  That being said, my knowledge of metal ends pretty abruptly around 1992.

Click above to listen on YouTube or .  . .

Download Megadeth’s “Rust in Peace” (8-bit Cover Album) on Google Play

Star Wars: The Last Jedi (Part 14)

As Leia sulks in the command center on Crait, we see the hooded figure of Luke enter, reminiscent of his entry into Jabba’s Palace in Return of the Jedi.  It’s a touching family reunion between the two.  Luke explains that he has to face Ben and that he can’t save him.  He ends the dialogue by saying that no one is ever really gone and hands her the gold dice from the Millennium Falcon.  It was hard not to feel touched by this moment.  Much like seeing Han and Chewie in action again and like seeing Han’s unfortunate death it is hard not to feel touched during these scenes with the original characters.

Luke then heads out onto the battlefield to face the First Order army.  In what seems like an anticlimactic move Kylo Ren orders every gun available to fire on him.  I’ll admit, a part of me thought that was it.  That was the tragic and cheap ending of Luke Skywalker.  However, after a moment, the smoke clears and Luke is left standing there without so much as a scratch on him.  It’s more like a scene from Dragon Ball Z than from Star Wars.  I was happy though that Luke was still with us, at least for a brief time more.

Sometime during this Finn somehow manages to transport Rose around the explosions surrounding Luke and back into the rebel base.  Meanwhile Kylo Ren takes a shuttle down to meet Luke face-to-face.  They stand there looking at each other and Kylo Ren asks if Luke came to save him.  Luke says, “No.”

After a few minutes Poe says, “He’s doing this for a reason!”  Then he figures  out that they have to make an escape.  Apparently no one ever tells Poe the plan.

The plan is pretty flawed.  They’ve already lost valuable time since Luke didn’t actually tell anyone the plan and they’re also backed into a corner with no perceivable way out.  That is, until, they discover that the weird crystal foxes are somehow getting in and out of the base.  They, unfortunately, reach a dead end with a pile of boulders blocking the path with gaps only large enough for the crystal foxes to squeeze through.

“I failed you, Ben.  I’m sorry,” Luke calls out across the salt flats.

“I’m sure you are,” Kylo Red screams back.  “The Resistance is dead, the war is over, and when I kill you, I would have killed the last Jedi!”  This marks the first time the title of a Star Wars movie has been delivered as a line of dialogue in a good Star Wars movie.

Luke then delivers a line he’s already used once with Rey:  “Every word you just said is wrong.”  Then the movie does a very non Star Wars thing and Luke’s words become a voice over as we see examples of what he is talking about.  “The rebellion is reborn today, the war has just beginning, and I will not be the last Jedi.”  It ends on Rey lifting all the boulders out of the way so the Resistance can escape.

First we see Luke emerge from the smoke like Goku, now we see him dodge lightsaber slashes like Neo dodging bullets.  Eventually he allows Kylo Ren to stab him through the heart and he doesn’t even flinch.  It’s then that we realize Luke has been conning Kylo Ren this whole time.  He’s not actually there at all.  Kylo Ren has been duped and Luke is merely projecting himself, a technique Kylo Ren had brought up earlier in the movie.

I’ll have to admit that I didn’t see this coming.  I know I’m in the minority.  Everyone else that saw this movie, apparently, noticed that Luke looked younger, that he was using his original blue lightsaber, that his feet were not leaving red streaks in the salt.  In retrospect it was incredibly obvious but I was maybe the one theater goer that was blown away by this trick ending.

Part of me could easily feel cheated out of the fact that there is not showdown between Luke and Kylo Ren.  I could extend that to the fact that this is the only Star Wars movie aside from Rogue One that there is no point where two lightsabers touch each other.  It is the only Star Wars movie with two lightsabers where no lightsabers touch each other.

That aside, it is actually a pretty sneaky trick by Luke Skywalker.  He keeps his promise that he is never going back and at the same time he achieves closure with Leia and helps the good guys escape.  Luke vanishes after being stabbed by Kylo Ren.

This is met with exactly the calmness we have come to expect from Mr. Ren.

Next up . . . a bit more about Luke’s role in The Last Jedi and the conclusion of the film!

#jamuary2018

#jamuary2018 – Free Download from Google Play

I found out about Jamuary a few months after the first one happened in Jamuary in 2017.  I was super excited when I learned about it from AfroDJMac and I couldn’t wait to participate in 2018.  The idea is recording or making music every day for the month of Jamuary.  I completed it hitting all 31 days and ending up with 31 tracks of varying quality, creativity, and style.  The point isn’t to make everything perfect, it is simply to make music every day.  This was the first time I’d made music every day in probably 20 years and it felt great.   AfroDJMac also proposed “Finish February” and above is the result of that.  His idea was to polish some of the Jamuary tracks and make an EP.  I had the poor idea to just release all the tracks after a few quick tweaks.  There are some I love, there are some I hate, and there are a lot in between but it was a great experience.  Looking forward to 2019!

Star Wars: The Last Jedi (Part 13)

On Crait there is a touching reunion between Poe and BB-8.  The happiness is countered immediately with Rose walking around saying, “Is this all that’s left?”  Given the fire we’ve seen from Rose it’s surprising that she doesn’t punch Poe in the face since he is directly responsible for her sister’s death.  Apparently that doesn’t happen to Poe.  Poe gets a free pass in life to do whatever he pleases.

The First Order lands and stars slowly moving toward the Big Ass Door with some sort of cannon that is clearly the sci-fi equivalent of a battering ram.  This strategy doesn’t really make much sense, similar to the AT-AT attack in The Empire Strikes Back but it does a good job of building tension.

Poe then announces a grand plan to take out he cannon.  Since Poe has such a great track record at not getting everyone killed everyone blindly follows him again.  At least at this point it seems like they don’t have a ton of choices.

From the trenches a soldier walks out onto the battlefield leaving what appear to be bloody footprints.  A soldier in the trenches sticks his finger in the red footprint then puts it in his mouth and spits it out saying, “Salt.”  It seems like a pretty unnecessary scene.  In doing some research it appears that the planet has red soil and it, for some reason, coated in a thin layer of salt.  That’s pretty neat and extremely cool visually but having this odd exposition seems out of place.

In one of the most visually spectacular moments in the movie a squadron of odd ships, balancing on single skis, bursts out of the base and begins their attack on the First Order army.  Great plumes of red salt burst out from behind the fighters like smoke.  In retrospect I am unclear if the red is the soil or salt at this point but it sure looks pretty.

When it looks like all is lost the Millennium Falcon comes from out of nowhere with Rey at the helm, blasting TIE fighters.  Everyone is now reunited in one glorious battle.  All this excitement is punctuated by Porgs immitating Chewbacca and being thrown against cockpit windows.

As it becomes clear once again that they are outmatched they give the order to retreat but Finn ignores it.  He decides he’s going to sacrifice himself to save the rebels and begins accelerating toward the battering ram cannon.  It seemed odd that they would kill Finn off in the second movie and apparently that was not the plan since Rose comes from out of nowhere and rams his ship with hers, a move that seemed almost as likely to kill him as what he was planning to do.

Finn runs over to Rose where she has to explain to him why she did what she did.  “It’s not about destroying what we hate, it’s about saving what we love.”  She then calls him a dummy before he kisses her and she passes out.  This is a great message but it might be a little lost in the fact that it seems like they are still going to be destroyed.

On cue the First Order army destroys the blast door and it seems like the end is in sight.  To add insult to the Resistance’s injury it is revealed that their distress signal has been received but they have gotten no response.  Leia then looks all depressed saying: “We’ve fought to the end but the galaxy has lost all its hope. The spark is out.”

This movie is really starting to be a major bummer.

Next up . . . Kylo Ren vs. Luke Skywalker!