Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens
Director: J.J. Abrams
Writers: Lawrence Kasdan & J.J. Abrams and Michael Arndt, based on characters created by George Lucas
Producers: J.J. Abrams, Bryan Burk, Kathleen Kennedy
Stars: Harrison Ford, Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, Adam Driver, Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, Oscar Isaac, Lupita Nyong’o, Andy Serkis, Domhnall Gleeson, Anthony Daniels, Max von Sydow, Gwendoline Christie
(ATTEMPTING TO BE SPOILER-LITE IN THIS REVIEW; BUT USE CAUTION)
Destiny is a mysterious power. How can one child given access to everything that is good and light turn out twisted and dark? How can another bred for nothing but hate and destruction suddenly choose the noble side of selflessness? And can someone with vast potential set adrift in a mean world with no guidance find their way to the greatness they dreamed of but never believed could be real? In every case, for reasons that beguile and excite and haunt us, inside of each of them, something awakens.
Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens is a movie about parents and offspring, both literal and spiritual. That makes it uncannily right for the audiences gathering in record numbers to see it. Many are parents who were once children begging their own parents to take them to the movies. We are all the offspring of a culture changed with planet-shaking power by George Lucas’s original film, once known only as Star Wars and now retrofitted with saga-appropriate numbering and punctuation to Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope. And we have waited for over thirty years to find out what became of the heroes and villains who thrilled and inspired us from a galaxy far, far away.
And here they are – Luke Skywalker, Leia Organa, Han Solo – weathered now, old enough to have accumulated many regrets and losses. They are comfortably knowing about the world of fast-paced peril they inhabit – when faced with yet another race-against-time underdog mission with impossible odds against a terrifying super-weapon, their familiarity with how this sort of thing goes plays as morbid comedy – and yet each in their way recognizes they are ceding the spotlight to a new generation, for good or tragically ill.
It is not a surprise that J.J. Abrams, who previously directed Mission: Impossible III and the first and second Star Trek re-boot films, would be able to deliver splashy and spectacular special effects franchise action. But it reminds me of that great observation from Stephen Sondheim – where he said he no longer worries about writing a bad song but is terrified of writing the wrong song. What makes this launch of a new generation of Star Wars adventures so primally satisfying is that it remembers what a Star Wars movie should feel like – breathlessly swift, eternally hopeful and, even at its darkest, exuberant – and that it uncannily identifies the right questions and themes a Star Wars movie should be exploring at this point in its story.
It remembers that, before the universe expanded to contain hundreds and thousands of characters, aliens, and worlds, that we all plugged in to the dreams of a boy who wanted adventure and excitement. In The Force Awakens, Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) has disappeared, and he represents something to all the main characters – family, a friend, a teacher, a hero, a myth. What he represents to us in the crowd is the hope that, somewhere in a galaxy spoiled by disappointing prequels and purchased and re-engineered by Disney for maximum profitability – something of that boy, some purity of his dream, is still out there, if we can only find it.
The search for him, in that uncanny Star Wars way, scoops up in a series of seeming accidents and coincidences characters that, with fuller understanding, all had an important purpose awaiting them. Kylo Ren, a dark Jedi working with The First Order (the remnants of the Empire now acting as a terrifying insurgency against the attempted peace of the Republic), is tormented by the Skywalker legacy and his sense that he must play a central role in it. Adam Driver plays Ren behind a dark mask and affected speech that has an obvious parentage, but he is not the cool and cruel specter Darth Vader was, rather an enraged prodigy with a crippled heart, willing himself towards the Dark Side out of impulses he cannot comprehend.
He leads a division of Stormtroopers in a murderous raid on a village, where a clue to Skywalker’s location is rumored to be hidden. Only one Stormtrooper, who has no name but will eventually accept the name Finn (John Boyega), is suddenly unable to fire his weapon on innocence, and finds an impossible supply of daring within himself to affect an escape from his life.
Finn ends up allied with Rey (Daisy Ridley), a fierce and resourceful scavenger on the desert world of Jakku, a graveyard wasteland of ruined ships from past Star Wars space battles. She identifies with these hollowed-out wrecks, having been left here as a child with no knowledge of why, and only dreams to remind her of where she came from.
Uniting them all is BB-8, a little rolling droid who carries an important secret. BB-8 is an instant classic in the category of Star Wars droids whose initiative and childlike capacity for instant and changeable emotions never fails to keep the narrative in motion.
What’s interesting about Finn, Rey, and Ren is that they are not as monochromatically iconic as the heroes they are inheriting this tale from. They are shaded, and haunted, by what came before them and produced them; and that’s another signal of this movie’s theme about offspring. The closest thing it contains to a classic serial hero is ace Resistance pilot Poe Dameron, played by Oscar Isaac with a dashing and dazzling charisma precisely correct for his role swooping into and out of the plot when needed.
It’s this exactitude, which shows director/producer/co-writer Abrams both understanding how to make something recognizably Star Wars and still evolve it using the technology and techniques developed in a post-Star Wars generation, that activates our familiarity and has us emotionally primed even before anything but the titles have appeared on the screen. Even when aliens are clearly digital creations, they are fake in a way that seems…well…Star Wars-y (except for an ominous character played by motion capture specialist Andy Serkis, who seems imported from a catacomb in Middle Earth).
Watch Domhnall Gleeson, playing First Order commander General Hux, as he rallies the Stormtroopers in classic Triumph of the Will staging. The camera is close enough to render his face Death Star-sized, and he hits a note of theatricalized volcanic fury that would be astonishingly easy to get wrong. That he gets it right (and makes Peter Cushing’s Grand Moff Tarkin seem like a textbook in understatement by comparison) is one of those things you really need to pull off in order for this business to actually work.
I will even risk fan wrath by saying that the three Star Wars prequels released from 1999 to 2005 play a significant, though ironic, role here. Many clichés have been written about George Lucas turning to the Dark Side, using the market power of his movies to expand his digital empire, and awkwardly blending strange political treatises with juvenile scatology and leaving his cast twisting on empty green stages. But in an age where Disney’s sibling brand Marvel is pushing the manipulation and exploitation of fan energy into realms of frightening precision and ubiquity, the wrong steps those movies made enabled the fantasy lover’s paradise of 21st century film by teaching what “fan service” meant in a new age of perpetual brand extension.
Star Wars was, in a way, the only movie franchise big enough to fail so spectacularly as to benefit all from its lessons, and still have something worthy at its heart that could be found, recovered, and restored. It is, after all, a pop epic about redemption. A character does something in this movie which directly, shockingly challenges the limits of audience’s capacity to ever forgive them; but as that is happening the bigger and more important question is answered – the saga has redeemed itself.
All of this is my attempt to articulate something in words which is not at all representative of what I did while watching Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens explode all over a screen in a theater full of rapturous fans. It doesn’t capture why, as I watched people gather before the show in groups of friends wearing their costumes, and I recognized faces not of people I knew, but of kinds I knew, thinking I understood without even having met them their loves and struggles growing up as nerds and geeks who wanted a world that venerated imagination and adventure, I felt fulfilled in a way beyond what an ordinary movie can accomplish.
It’s not another movie, it’s Star Wars. It’s not perfect; but, if we’re honest, the parents never were either. What counts is that it could have turned out a million different ways, yet, as if by magic, wears the name bequeathed to it astoundingly, delightfully well.