Again you sound very impatient and are jumping to conclusions. Fact is you don't know what their plans are for the character, but rather than waiting for the character to be revealed over the course of the trilogy you are jumping to the conclusion now that he won't be any different from the Emperor. The only ways he is like the emperor as of now is that he is the leader of a tyrannical government, which isn't a negative mark against the character, and he seduced a powerful force user like countless Sith have.
And Snoke was handled in TFA the way the Emperor was handled in ESB. If you were ok with the Emperor in ESB you should be fine with how Snoke was handled in TFA. Both are a question mark at the end of the film they are introduced in.
Again, the Emperor had the luxury of being the first big bad of the franchise. Snoke doesn't. And that's why right now he's a ripoff. And I hate ripoffs.
They didn't need to tell anything about him in this film to tell the story in TFA. How he is different or isn't will be explored in 8 or 9. Or maybe even 10 if he manages to survive this trilogy.
They did, to differentiate him or make him even remotely interesting.
You say you wanted him to be like the concept art, and he was damn near identical to the concept art. Is it the cgi that you dislike? Because if you like the concept art you should like the design in the film because they are the same.
The creepy factor of the concept art or the "one could say Snoke was once handsome" part of it weren't there in the movie.
How exactly did he phone in his performance? What more did you want him to do while delivering the lines and part he had?
See, the Emperor had more or less generic lines, but McDiarmid made him work in RotJ. I wasn't there with JJ to tell you what he could've done, but I didn't like what I got in terms of performance. He bored me.
He was giving Kylo and Hux orders like tyrannical leaders tend to do. So a tyrannical leader giving specific orders to his underlings is considered generic? And he gave Kylo some info about who was involved with the people who had the map leading to Luke. Was that generic? Cause I don't think that's all that generic or bad.
I think it was both. Interchangeable lines that could've been uttered by Hux, for the most part.
The mystery of him is what makes him interesting to me right now. He is a question mark right now. Just like the Emperor was. All we know is he leads the First Order and seduced Ben. Since this is a trilogy he will be expanded upon. After we see where they are going with his character then we can decide whether he really is a token bad guy or only Emperor 2.0. Anything more would just be jumping to a conclusion.
There's the exciting version of a mystery and the non-exciting one. Snoke is the latter, to me. Neither the script nor Andy have given me anything to look forward to because Snoke's just... there. At least the Ren have Kylo as their "master", so there's SOMEthing of an interesting mystery. Maz finding the legacy saber is also an example of an exciting mystery.
And it was told to us in a natural way.
My point is it could've been revealed via the Vader helmet scene, too. I don't hate the exposition itself.
You mean like ANH name drops the Sith? It was fine then. Why not now?
I never said it was fine then. It was never explored what the Sith were until the Prequels. And even then, the Sith as a concept came first. Once again, to avoid comparisons with something that came before, you need to do more than namedrop. You need to differentiate.
If they were the Sith they would call themselves Sith. They don't. That's enough to tell you they are different. How they are different exactly isn't relevant to TFA's story. We'll find out about them in later films and/or books and/or comics.
When I'm assessing whether I like a movie or not I don't count what a potential EU product or a sequel will do. You'll notice I'm calling Snoke an Emperor ripoff "as of now" in a previous post.
In terms of TFA, Snoke doesn't work and it's not because he's a plot hole or anything. It's just that, TFA is a 7th movie in a franchise and some elements of it are extremely similar to others that came before. They should've at least tried the minimum to make them different. It might (and probably will) work retro-actively, but understand that on its own, it looks bad cos we've seen the Snoke/Kylo dynamic before and not in a general Master/apprentice way. It's like Vader/Emperor and it's just not a good thing for a movie. TFA is getting enough heat for being too much like ANH with some ESB in it, and one of the reasons is exactly because of Snoke and, to a lesser extent, the Ren. People came out of the theater muttering "Sith". They never understood that the new faction Snoke leads is the Knights of Ren because the movie just namedrops them. And you know what? The viewers are right. The information was said, but not shown. You think people cared about the term Sith when it was said during ANH? No. For the exact same reasons. Only then it wasn't evocative of something that had come before it. Now it is.
What exactly did he do different in his very brief lines in the trailer and his lines in the film?
