Star Wars Saturdays: Two takes on "The Force Awakens"

2015 Jonathan vs 2023 Jonathan on Star Wars VII

On Saturdays, we’re going through the entire STAR WARS saga in episodic order, a series that will include a number of pieces that have never appeared online before taken from my book 200 Reviews, available now in Paperback or on Kindle (which you should really consider buying, because it’s an awesome collection!). We continue today with the first film in the ill-considered Disney sequel trilogy, THE FORCE AWAKENS. Enjoy…

Star Wars: The Force Awakens

2015, Dir. J.J. Abrams

Composite of writing from 2023 and a piece originally published December 22^nd, 2015

The Force Awakens never fully rises above its own derivativeness, or its own lack of imagination in extending the world of Star Wars above and beyond the possibilities opened by Return of the Jedi, but the cast is so damn good, and the direction so sharp and light on its feet, that it remains a good time. It is very far from being a great Star Wars film, but it is, at its best, a reasonably fun Star Wars film – even if, at its core, it feels a bit more televisual than cinematic. J.J. Abrams is, after all, one of the best in the business at the complex art of TV pilots, and that’s basically what he delivered here, his skillset for introducing characters and touring their world through dynamic action shining brightly. The first act in particular really cooks, everything working like gangbusters from Finn and Poe’s escape from the First Order through Rey and Finn’s flight from Jakku.

The script gets much thinner around the middle; very little in the film really works during the stopover at Maz Kanata’s place, and the First Order suddenly destroying the entire star system of the New Republic in a single space laser blast is such an unimaginably horrific act of destruction that I am actively disturbed at how completely the film ignores its aftermath and implications. None of the characters here, save Han Solo, really get fully articulated character arcs, though Finn is undoubtedly done dirtiest; his insistence in the final act that he’s “just here to get Rey” robs him of a real sense of character growth, as he has not come to believe in anything other than this one friend, and while The Last Jedi makes up for it somewhat by giving Finn a story where he comes to believe in The Cause so strongly he is now willing to die for it, that doesn’t let The Force Awakens off the hook for fumbling his character at the one-yard line. Making the location of Luke Skywalker the film’s central MacGuffin is mildly clever in the moment and catastrophically stupid in the long-run, nonsensical as a plot mechanic and, more importantly, indicative of the film’s failure to imagine a world bigger than that illustrated in the Original Trilogy. Return of the Jedi ended with Luke tossing his lightsaber away; The Force Awakens is about Rey finding it and bringing it back to him. As fun and breezy as this film can be, it is built atop a fundamental misunderstanding of the story George Lucas told.