Star Wars: The Review Awakens

I had a very hard time writing this review.

Normally, when I see a movie and intend to review it for Damage Control, I avoid all other material until the review is posted. I do this partly to avoid the possibility of plagiarism, but also because I want to offer you readers purely my own perspective, as you likely already read that of other people and seeing more of the same from me is just a waste of your time.

But when one of the people with whom I saw The Force Awakens asked me during the credits what I thought of the movie, I had no answer to offer. Luckily, this was in the midst of Naughty and Nice, so I didn’t HAVE to crank out a movie review for the following Tuesday. With time on my side, surely I’d have my feelings sufficiently searched for what I know to be true by the next month.

I came up with some superficial opinions just fine. The new Imperial uniforms were amorphous blobs with no indication of status or rank, the bottom of the Millennium Falcon had no right to be so imperviously durable, there were scenes in the trailer cut from the movie and so on.

But as time went on, all I could sense was the conflict. So I did something I had never done before; I talked to several of my friends about what they took away from the movie. I hoped this would prime my creative pump, so to speak.

They had a lot of interesting things to say. Once was deeply moved, they said, by how much the writers, actors and directors “got” the connection between a parent and child. Another criticized that the one thing the prequels did right — expanding the universe by introducing so many new and diverse locations and peoples — was abandoned in The Force Awakens, which was a showcase of original trilogy climates: desert planet, ice planet, jungle planet.

These conversations lead me to two ideas: That it was so, so good to see ACTING in a Star Wars movie again, and that the prequels have as much to learn from The Force Awakens as the new movie does its predecessor trilogy.

Something, something Dark Side

In Rylo Ken, we see what Anakin Skywalker should have been. Jedi and Sith don’t represent good and evil so much as balance and chaos. The Jedi gain their potency the long, hard way though zen mastery while the Sith give in to their emotions and ride the wave to quick bursts of rich empowerment or a simmering tempest of stewing power, but are never really in control of it when unstimulated.

Anakin should have illustrated this difference not by murdering Tusken Raiders, but simply by losing his cool the way Rylo Ken does. Acting out his frustration rather than whining about how the man is holding him down. Voicing his uncertainty and trepidation about being the Chosen One and what it even meant rather than getting pissy that it wasn’t a VIP pass to whatever he happened to want at the time.

While Rylo Ken is the elite villain, these moments also show he is a work in progress, much like the story’s new heroes. This, along with a few well-designed handicaps, allows for a much more satisfying first direct encounter with them, rather than Rylo Ken just beating them handedly and then having to make some lazy excuse to not kill the good guys outright. You know the ones: “You are not worth killing,” chuck the heroes off a cliff or leave them in an overly elaborate death trap and walk away, assuming everything goes according to plan.

So I’m happy to see Star Wars again. I’m happy to see it done with the kind of practical effects the series put on the map in the first place. Good dialogue. Actors knocking it out of the park. Stormtroopers with better aim. Less of a sausage fest. In many ways, like the example above, The Force Awakens is better than any Star Wars movie that came before it.

The lion’s share of the screen time is given to the new characters, and they richly deserve the attention. They’re fun, interesting and new. There is a purpose and direction to them, unlike how our favorite people got started in A New Hope. And when we see our favorites again, they are treated with respect and given almost exactly as much screen time as they need to not get overdone. Well, except for R2D2 and C3PO, but we don’t serve their kind here.

But in many ways, The Force Awakens fails to be much more than a love letter to A New Hope. The plot has any number of sticking points that any amatuer could have smoothed over, yet remain in the finished project. The problem isn’t in the parts. The pieces are fantastic individually. The problem is that they’ve been thrown together a little haphazardly. Sometimes, it works like it was actually planned. Other times, the cracks are unfathomably bad and ideas that got orphaned at some point in the writing process weren’t excised from the final cut of the movie.

Spoiler alert: C3PO’s red arm was entirely pointless.

Mythology gag?

J.J. Abrams must have learned a thing or two since Star Trek Into Darkness. First, there’s no lens flares. Second, he figured out how to refer to continuity without having it be a distracting sideshow.

While my friend complained that the movie’s universe was too small compared to the prequel movies (other issues aside), I felt it needed to be smaller. As a introductory movie to a new story and a new audience, it needs to keep its focus small at the beginning so there’s a solid anchor from which to start exploring the universe.

At least I hope that’s what will happen. Some things in The Force Awakens are still too small and need elaboration in the movies to come.

Being the first movie in a trilogy, it needs to operate in a certain level of mystery. And that’s exactly why I’m okay with the focus being tight and not doing much to expand the boundaries of the Star Wars universe. Character arcs and new discoveries about what’s going on behind the scenes must play out over the course of three movies.

But there’s a few basic things the movie glosses over that has nothing to do with saving mysteries for later.

Chief among the unessecarily privileged information is the geopolitical nature of the New Republic and the Old Empire. That all gets hand waved. The New Republic is mentioned and does exist. But instead of our heroes being the New Republic, they’re the Resistance… for some reason.

The Resistance is tiny. VERY tiny. Almost everybody in it is an aged veteran of the Rebel Alliance’s military branch who apparently never got jobs in the New Republic or its military.

Speaking of which, WHERE IS the New Republic Navy? Why aren’t the armed forces of a legitimate major interstellar government engaged in wiping out an apparently unpopular terrorist insurgency? Why is this the job of a bunch of well-known, non-burnable war heroes with fewer than two dozen X-wings and a single troop lander to their name? Why don’t they have capital ships? Why no A, B or Y-wings? The Y-wings sure would have come in handy during that do-or-die, fate-of-the-universe BOMBING mission.

And what, exactly, is the First Order? Is it the remains of the Galactic Empire, or just a fringe group among them? If it were a fringe group, that would explain why the New Republic didn’t want open hostilities with their military, lest they inflame the rest of the remaining Imperial forces. That would have been a wonderful explanation as to why the Resistance ever needed to exist. Too bad the movie doesn’t even bother to explain. Heck, that could have been one extra sentence in the opening crawl.

The movie did do a lot to show us behind the scenes of the First Order. We know they have an Emperor-like figure and a general who seems to be of equal or superior rank to Rylo Ken. We learn about their ideology, their recruitment and training practices and much more than we ever saw about the Imperial Navy despite having less screen time to do it in.

But essential information to understanding the stakes of the plot is still missing. How far does the First Order reach? Do they have other bases? Do they control any sizeable portion of the galaxy? Is the First Order a government or just a military? Movie’s got no time for that.

The language barrier and stellar cartography

When George Lucas isn’t writing the dialog, good things can happen. Clunky and odd word substitutions to remind the audience that nobody is REALLY speaking English are mostly a thing of the past.

However, nobody has figured out how to deliver exposition about MacGuffins despite that all being laid out in the opening text crawl.

The most heinous example of this is the motivating item in this plot is “The Map to Luke Skywalker.” Because somebody made a map specifically locating Luke Skywalker. Not where he likely is, not the place he was looking for himself (thus making it HIS OWN map, and also making a hell of a lot more sense). Nope, just some random denizen of the galaxy made this thing literally called “The Map to Luke Skywalker” and spit it into pieces to keep Gannon from getting the Triforce of Wisdom.

Even worse, the entire movie is about finding the last piece. All the others have already been collected by the not-Rebel Alliance and the not-Empire. It would have made no difference to the story whatsoever if the final piece of the map was instead the entire thing… except for the fact that they needed a reason to not use the map as soon as they got it. Though they already HAD that excuse with the need to recuse Rey and destroy the superweaon. Luke wasn’t going to go anywhere. But instead, it has to be a map fragment, and it just happens to be the 10% of the galaxy (a good chunk in the middle too) that nobody has ever explored or mapped before because they couldn’t match it to any known system. In Star Wars. Where you can go from one end of the galaxy to the other in hours. And ships can’t hyperdrive through unmapped areas, so in all of history, they’ve had to go around this big hole in the galaxy. This whole map thing was an idiotic and unnecessary killer of the suspension of disbelief.

Iambic pentameter

”[Star Wars] it’s like poetry… It rhymes.”

— George Lucas

In The Force Awakens, we see not-Tatooine, not-Endor, not-Coruscant, not-Yavin and not-Hoth (in that order).

We see a rag-tag group of rebels attack a planet-killing superwapon from a base currently being targeted by said super weapon. We also see nobody bothers to leave the doomed base, despite this one having an easily evacuated skeleton crew to begin with.

We see a Jedi master living on the fringes in a beard and robe. And I’m sure that making such a blatant comparison between Luke and Obi-Wan means Luke’s going to be dead before this trilogy is done.

Verdict: Go for it (4/5). I don’t think it’s really a 4 out of 5 — why I don’t really use a strict numeric scale — but I do think you should see it just the same.