Re-Boot of the Jedi
Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens / directed by J.J. Abrams
Some day I’d like to explore possible reasons for why I think Star Wars has had such a magnetic hold on so many (males) of my generation and beyond; for now, I wanted to note this in connection with the excitement I’ve personally felt leading up to the release of The Force Awakens, an excitement fed by a cleverly restrained ad campaign that made the new movie seem to contain expansive possibilities for a fellow eager to glimpse them. Another way of putting this caveat to what follows: I’m not a Star Wars fan, but someone who despite his best critical judgment feels this franchise exert a mysterious power that at times seems to flow through every living thing and bind the universe together from one end to the other: the power of. . . nostalgia.
OK, enough of that — on to the main attraction! The Force Awakens is a curious concoction: deeply entertaining in the manner of the original three films, it’s well-paced and infused with new energies via fresh, young characters. But in largely repeating the plot of the original Star Wars, with hefty chunks of The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi thrown in, it has an inescapably synthesized, crowd-pleasing quality; giving us what we think we want, it forecloses the more exciting possibility of giving us something we didn’t see coming. Despite the inclusion of the original trilogy’s cast, the film strikes me as more of a re-boot than a sequel. After all, it turns out that not much has changed since the second half-built Death Star was blown up and Ewoks danced in non-sexually ecstatic celebration. Thirty or so years on, there’s still an Empire, or at least its strengthening remnants, in the form of the First Order, and there’s still a rebel alliance, now known as the Resistance. And off in the distance is some fancy, pansy-ass republic that’s slow to grasp the First Order threat; I believe it’s called the New Republic, in clear homage to the venerable political journal. You’ve got a robot with highly important information that has to be returned to the right people, a Darth Vader wanna-be in the form of face-masked Kylo Ren (Adam Driver), and an orphaned youngster named Rey (Daisy Ridley) living in obscurity on a desert planet about to get smacked hard by an onrush of Force-propelled fate.
There are some nice atmospherics in early sequences that introduce us to Rey, as she ekes out a livelihood scavenging parts from crashed starships left over from the star wars of yesteryear; she shimmies through their vast blown-out interiors, then makes her escape by sliding down their sand-covered flanks, in a welcome evocation of massive scale, decayed grandeur, and the passage of past empires. Plucky and resourceful, she’s an immediately likeable and sympathetic presence. Before long, fate and her good conscience mean she’s on the run from the First Order, even making her escape on the Millennium Falcon like Luke from Tatooine so many years before. She finds herself in unexpected duo-hood with a stormtrooper desertee, Finn, (John Boyega), who is likewise sympathetic, if curiously undamaged by his years of training and indoctrination by the nefarious First Order.
When our heroes meet up with Han Solo (Harrison Ford) and his faithful Wookie sidekick Chewbacca (Peter Mayhew), the effect is giddy and sort of trippy; without a doubt, the movie shifts into a higher gear. Partly it’s just the enjoyment of seeing Ford back in character after 30-some years; until I saw the film, I wasn’t completely sure if he’d be able to pull it off. But revisiting the role seems to bring out a special spark in Ford. He may be moving more slowly, but there’s a slyness and energy in his portrayal; he almost convinced me that he’d still been smuggling shit around the galaxy for the past few decades.
For all its evocation of lurking menace, the mode of The Force Awakens is mainly some combination of rip-roaring and swashbuckler, with occasional micro-doses of screwball humor thrown in. It feels silly to critique it for deviations from psychological realism (Finn is a REALLY nice guy considering he’s been a soldier in a highly regimented and militaristic organization, though the writers seek to explain this away by pointing out that he was stolen from his family at an early age and actually worked on a sanitation detail. OK then!), so apart from the snarky parenthetical aside, I’m not going to bother. But the film is done a disservice by a lack of backstory on its villain, which turns out be central to the film’s emotional resonance, or lack thereof. It’s ironic that Abrams, who co-created Lost, a show that was masterful in its use of flashback, isn’t able to give us a more complete account of important prior events. Context is slapped on, not carefully shaped, and this approach isn’t enough to do the job.
Or at least to do the job for adults. Because it did dawn on me, as it really should have before I even watched the movie, that this is a film whose primary audience is kids; a new Star Wars for a new generation, with new characters with whom they can identify and enter this long-lived franchise.