There’s no upside for me in reviewing Star Wars: The Force Awakens. If I say anything interesting about its plot, I’ll be criticized for publishing spoilers. If I say anything critical, I’ll be accused of raining on everybody’s parade. If I praise it, I’ll be attacked for excessive kindness and sentimentality. So let me just say that I thought it was pretty good, that I enjoyed watching it, and that it has all the strengths and weaknesses of every project with which its cowriter and director,
J. J. Abrams, is involved. Which is to say: Its first 45 minutes are sensational; it plays on the viewer’s emotions expertly; and it is cast brilliantly.
Good acting is something new for the Star Wars franchise. The original Star Wars (which I refuse to call “episode 4” or “A New Hope”) was, to be kind, indifferently performed except when Alec Guinness and Harrison Ford were on screen (and when James Earl Jones’s voice was heard). As for the first two sequels, it should be enough to point out that, aside from Ford, the only decent acting job was by Yoda. And the performers in the second Star Wars trilogy were so wooden they made the Petrified Forest look like the Royal Shakespeare Company.
Not so The Force Awakens. Not only has Abrams roused a sensationally effective and affecting Harrison Ford from what seems like decades of Rip Van Winkle-like somnolence, his movie is distinguished by the vibrancy three young actors bring to its leading roles. Abrams has an unsurpassed talent for picking unknowns, especially strong and vibrant women. Actresses who owe their careers to him include Jennifer Garner (Alias), Keri Russell (Felicity), Evangeline Lilly (Lost), and Gugu Mbatha-Raw (Undercovers). Now Abrams has scored perhaps his greatest coup with Daisy Ridley, who plays Rey, the movie’s distaff Luke Skywalker. This 23-year-old with only a few British television episodes to her credit is an absolute knockout—touching, interesting, and tough, all at the same time. Abrams worked similar magic in choosing the buoyant and equally unknown John Boyega to play Finn, her partner in space adventuring.
Finn and Rey begin their battle against the Dark Side of the Force together after he mysteriously breaks free from the lifelong brainwashing of the First Order (the organization that arose from the ashes of the Empire that was destroyed 30 years earlier in Return of the Jedi). They are joined now and again by the wonderful Oscar Isaac, the most interesting American actor at work today in the movies, who does a joyously swashbuckling turn as a fighter pilot.
Their nemesis is Adam Driver, the far-from-unknown young actor who has done such remarkable work on TV’s Girls and in the wonderful Noah Baumbach movie While We’re Young. He has been given the nearly impossible task of playing an immature and tormented master villain, and as is always the case with Driver, he finds a way to surprise us in nearly every scene.
This is what is exceptional about The Force Awakens—that and its rich texture. The sets, the special effects, and a certain lived-in feeling echo Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back in making it seem like we’ve been transported to a galaxy out of a fairy tale. (This was not the case with the dreadful Return of the Jedi, which was regrettably designed to suggest its teddy-bear freedom-fighting Ewoks were outer-space Sandinistas.)
Truth to tell, there isn’t all that much that’s actually bad about The Force Awakens. The political structure of its universe makes no sense, but so what? The movie’s job is to take us on a nostalgic joyride through the Star Wars universe, and in that respect it is an unmitigated success.
But the one thing J. J. Abrams really can’t do—not here, not in his Star Trek reboot, not in his Mission Impossible reboot back in 2006, and not in the television series he has supervised—is tell a complete story. As ever, he just casts all kinds of plotlines in the water and doesn’t reel them in. It’s a trick and, as Admiral Ackbar says in Return of the Jedi, it’s a trap too—because after everybody in the world sees this movie, there will be a million theories about how those plots will be resolved, and their resolution in the subsequent Star Wars pictures will inevitably prove a total letdown.
George Lucas did a genuinely nervy thing in 1980 when he let The Empire Strikes Back end without resolving the fate of Ford’s Han Solo, left frozen in a block of carbonite. That was a violation of storytelling protocol, and it worked because it was so unexpected—and because he had pulled off the storytelling coup of revealing the dark parentage of Luke and Leia minutes earlier.
There are no storytelling coups in The Force Awakens. The only true coup here is that Disney is going to come very close to earning back the entirety of its $4 billion purchase of the Star Wars franchise from Lucas with this one picture. J. J. Abrams may have cheated the audience out of a genuinely satisfying plot, but he has served his true masters well.
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is The Weekly Standard‘s movie critic.
