Giant Fighting Robot ?Fight?

Remember when I pointed to those giant fighting robots? Well, courtesy of grrm I have learned that our (American) side challenged the Japanese side, who also apparently have a giant fighting robot.

The Japanese apparently have accepted and even raised the stakes.

Hilarity and awesomeness are likely to ensue.

We saw Star Wars:The Force Awakens and it was neither as bad nor as good

Which is to say it was neither as bad as I had feared, nor as good as it could have been. Mostly it seemed to be Kasdan and Abrams saying "Oh, there was this thing that people really loved in the original so we should totally re-create that." There is zero surprise in this film and you can feel free to nap at any point in its 2h15min duration without fear you'll miss something unique.

I'd call some of what follows spoilers except there's really nothing to spoil in this film.

Let's see - there's the plucky robot with the secret information; there's the desert planet with the young adult who doesn't know their secret power; there's the old wise advisor; there's the guy who ought to be a hero but decides to run away when danger closes in, only to come back and be a hero anyway; there's the giant mega-death destroyer whateverthefuck; there's the plucky rebel fighters with biker names; there's the trench run with stupid mechanical pivot turrets; there's the cantina (with a different name); there's the giant projected evil emperor... err, whatever he's calling himself now. Et cetera. I could go on and on, but I won't.

So then the question is - is it a good homage/pastiche? Yeah, it's not bad. Most of the good stuff is pretty faithfully re-created. It's nice having the universe mostly saved by a black guy and a woman this time, even if you have to accept a non-human female (muppet) as 'woman' in order to get the film to pass the Bechdel test. I do give them props for having her tell him (in very G-rated language) to fuck off every time he tries to "save" her. Self-rescuing princess test? Passed with flying colors. I did not appreciate the dearth of other colored faces - if Finn is supposed to be either a clone or a creche baby stolen from his actual parents where are the other dark-skinned people who got cloned/got their kids stolen? And did anyone think to check whether it was a good idea to play with slavery tropes by implying that white folk are still going around stealing black children and using those babies as slave labor? But I digress.

It's definitely bigger, boomier, flashier and all things Abrams. It's still complete nonsense from any kind of physics or science point of view but if you go to Star Wars for that kind of thing you're probably making a bigger error than anything in the film.

So, yeah, not a bad thing to spend a couple hours on but it's a measure of how awful Star Wars films have been that this is probably the third-best of all seven. Low bar to clear and all that.