So, three-ish months of blogging down and here we are reviewing Star Wars. Here goes...
Let's get the positives out of the way now. Star Wars: Episode 7: The Force Awakens: Again With the Colons is full stop the best Star Wars movie made. It is superior to A New Hope in every conceivable way. and for clarification on that, here's a list:
Inclusion! This Star Wars features an elfin heroine named Rey and a black defecting Stormtrooper named Finn. Already both of them pull the story away from the almost entirely white cast of the original and, Samuel L's novel badassery aside, the entirely white cast of the 2000s prequels. Casting a black Stormtrooper (John Boyega of the British sci-fi/comedy Attack the Block) with the back story of being taken as a child and raised in a military academy to serve the First Order has some obvious allusions to slavery, but it also reminds the audience that the white clad menaces are just people. Not droids or mindless clones, just average people, and when people who are just like you and me are the ones massacring entire villages seemingly at will, well, that's scarier than the most cloned of clone armies or the droidiest of droids.
Rey, played by an absolutely wonderful Daisy Ridley, makes it known pretty quickly that she doesn't need anyone to take her hand and lead her away from danger, and more than once rushes, overwhelmed, under-prepared and outgunned, straight into it. There's a great dynamic between Rey and Finn, each prisoners of a very small world in their own regard. Finn may be physically strong, a crack shot and a determined fighter, but that's all he is, whereas Rey has had to learn survival on her own, selling scrap to a slum lord on a desert world. She is clearly the more capable of the two, and I don't know if Abrams or writer Lawrence Kasdan (of Raiders of the Lost Arc script-fame) intended, but it's a pretty damning implication of militarized society. Finn existing in civilian society, to the extent that there is one in the Star Wars universe (it's called Star Wars, not Star Town-Hall Discussion or Star Disciplinary Committee Action Plan for Christs' sake) comes across as wooden, awkward, even a little scared when simply interacting with other people. Rey also speaks a ton of alien languages and often gets stuck interpreting for Finn. She's has seen that the outside world requires a little more finesse when one looks at straight on and not down the barrel of a blaster. And speaking of Rey...
Acting? Star Wars is the last place one looks for good acting, but hope against hope, Ridley and Boyega pull it off. Ridley's best scene is her confrontation with bad guy Kylo Ren (played also wonderfully by Adam Driver), when she begins to understand her connection to the plot-- er, Force. She manages to convey with facial expressions alone the act of discovery: first confusion, then fear, and finally understanding that Ren's mind probe is not only useless to him, but a tool for her. This comes across again in her lightsaber battle with Ren later. It's a nice and badly needed injection of both subtlety and humanism into the otherwise flat landscape of cardboard cutouts with people in black leotards carrying then around that serves as typical Star Wars characters.
Han Solo -- arguably the real protagonist of the first three movies -- makes a prominent appearance playing the role of Darth Your Dad, and while the performance is good, Harrison Ford is, at the end of all things, Harrison Ford. It is the reason for his nearly half-century of incredible personal success and also his single greatest limitation. The inclusion of the Raiders script writer plants on Han the onus of cheeky one-liners (like, "Escape now, hug later!"), and Han's short-fused but admiring relationship with Chewbacca is as endearing as ever. He was far too likable in the first three movies for this, but now that Han is old, guilt ridden and back to smuggling like the the Jabba the Hutt days, it is evident that Chewie is not only his oldest, but his only friend.
I was disappointed that Carrie Fisher's reprisal of now-General Leia was so short and insubstantial, considering the degree to which Fisher's honesty about being a woman in her 50s navigating the chew-em-up-n-spit-em-out gauntlet that is a Hollywood career has blown up TV-land. No metal bikinis this time around. Fisher's admission that she has never "not been in Star Wars," and her personal history of feminist activism in a landscape that hasn't changed syncs up nicely with Leia, taking an active part in another rebellion against yet another macho space-fascist regime.
And it isn't really worth mentioning Mark Hamill reprising his role as Darth Red Herring but I will leave you to judge if those few precious seconds were worth it.
A kind of pathetic villain. For all the time and massive, phallic towers of money spent hyping evildoer Kylo Ren, I feel bad for the guy If the film were flipped to his point of view, it would be titled Kylo's Really Crap Week at Work or something. Ren worships Darth Vader's rotting skull and doesn't need the mask or voice modulator but wears them anyway. They straight up gave him a World War 1 German helmet too; slap a spike on it and you have Darth Picklehaube. But under the mask, Ren is just a kid, markedly younger than the military commanders with whom he serves and it shows, and has a propensity to temper tantrums involving his lightsaber. He is less omnipotent sovereign of pain and hate and more spoiled brat whose dad gave him a middle-management job he totally didn't earn. It is a welcome departure from the menacing calm of Vader or the scheming evil of Emperor Palpatine.
No mention of those goddamned Midichlorians. Back in 1977, people were legitimately worried about computers taking over the world (hint: they were right). Part of why Star Wars hit such a cultural note was that it played off this fear. In a galaxy where there was space travel and laser guns, there was still The Force -- that unexplained connection that a living thing has to life, the universe and everything. Audiences reportedly gave standing ovations when Luke Skywalker famously switched off his targeting computer and eyeballed his shot on the Death Star.
Fast forward to the cynical 2000s and The Force was explained away with breeding: Force-capable kids were born with a high count of bacteria called Midichlorians that allowed them to tap into cool junk-throwy mind-controly lightning-shooty powers. This was actually closer to the original script Lucas envisioned, where Starkiller (bet you didn't get that reference, nerds!) passes use of the force on only through his children and the Jedi order is essentially a carbon-copy of the Bene Gesserit messiah-generation program from Dune (Lucas had an early problem with lifting plot points and entire scenes of dialog from other works, including an almost word-for-word rip of Gandalf's "Good morning!" speech from The Hobbit).
Episode 7, smartly, thankfully, does away with this Nazi bullshit and never brings it up. The Force still does whatever the plot needs it to, but now at least does it more mysteriously and maybe a little more zen, like someone bought it a feng shui book or something.
Now the other stuff. Comparing The Force Awakens to A New Hope directly in the beginning was deliberate, because it is A New Hope. Almost every plot point, twist, and archetype show up again in almost the same order (unlikely and/or unwilling heroes find destiny; surprising parentage, mentors meet their fate; a planet-destroying weapon and long-ass space battle). The new Star Wars treads so much old ground that it likely died of thirst wandering the Dune Sea or tripped into a Sarlacc pit. This isn't to say that it's a bad movie, of course; just mind-numbingly unoriginal.
It's the same issue long-running video game franchises have as well. The Legend of Zelda is damn near 30 with half as many iterations, and while they are very good at exploiting the technology of the time (moving from 2D to 3D or using physics engines for example), jumping from the 1986 debut to the most recent brings nothing new to the table. I feel confident enough saying that The Force Awakens had what was effectively an unlimited budget, so it could fully realize the potential for animation, but how much of it is new is up for serious debate. (Aside: this is ironic considering Lucas created the cowboys-in-space classic he did almost directly because he kept running out of money.)
The biggest problem with Star Wars as a whole is that you don't get much wiggle room as a writer when everything comes down to a cosmic battle between two extremely rigid ideas of good and evil. The fabled Sith might sound imposing on paper, but they make no goddamned sense: if each individual Sith is supposed to kill any other fellow Sith in order to seize power, why do people join in the first place and how does the organization last long enough to build the biggest space army in all of space?
Likewise, many writers have pointed out the Jedi are essentially the secret Gestapo-like police of the galaxy: they claim children born into certain conditions whether the family agrees or not and otherwise undermine the politics of even the most backwater worlds to suit a notion of order that may or may not work for that world.
When you slap all of these limitations on to the fact that it's freaking Star Wars, the kinds of movies one is allowed to write that will have the requisite box-office success required of Hollywood and franchise-owner Disney dwindles. For example, I imagine someone at a meeting about the concept of the film brought up the fact that it isn't Star Wars without R2D2, so a tiny portion of the script has to justify the world's favorite ambulatory trash can reentry into the series. The same goes for C3PO (played by original actor Anthony Daniels), though at least "I've been helping out Leia for the past 30 years" is way more plausible than "A bunch of bacteria made a child in the Alabama trailer park of the galaxy mega-smart and he built C3PO to be his friend before handing the droid over the rebellion and then turning evil." Think of it as the creative version of death by a thousand cuts: banality by a thousand self-references.
It is also plagued by action sequences that, I am sorry to say, just aren't very good. I said in my first post for this site that the elements of a J.J. Abrams Star Wars were largely known by virtue of what he did with Star Trek and I was right. Lots of Tie Fighters explode and crash into things and the entirely-animated dogfight scenes drag on for way too long. I don't know if I am getting older or what, but extended battle scenes just bore me. I can't stay awake for Return of the King.
At the end of the day, I don't have any real feelings of substance towards J.J. Abrams. He directs movies that go on for a length of time and are generally entertaining. But, as I said, when everything is boiled down to such base elements and all of the subtlety and nutrition float off like so much vapor, it is difficult to feel a strong anything.
But I digress. See Episode 7, even if you're not a Star Wars person. Like Skyfall did for James Bond, it straddles both worlds of being a Star Wars movie and also being a good movie at the same time. A couple of times I caught myself with a big dipshit grin on my face, and you can ask Ash: that doesn't happen very often.
Wait a minute: where hell are Han's dice!?
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