Star Wars: The Force Awakens–The Dark Side Review

Unless you’re not going to see it and are just curious. In which case, go ahead and read. You filthy commie.

What follows are some disjointed thoughts on Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

* It’s almost impossible to judge a cultural event such as The Force Awakens with any critical distance. The build-up is so intense that the anticipation pushes the scale in one direction or the other—either people make excuses for a movie that they’re desperate not to be disappointed by or their disappointment is magnified because a merely good movie wasn’t transcendent.

And The Force Awakens carried such enormous expectations that there’s no way it—or any movie—could live up to them. In fact, you could argue that only one movie, in the history of film, has ever held up to this level of cultural anticipation. (That would be The Empire Strikes Back, obviously.)

* All of that said, The Force Awakens is great. Or pretty good, at least. Look, it’s fine. It’s better than Return of the Jedi. Sure, it’s nowhere near as great as A New Hope or Empire. But it has Harrison Ford! And he’s fantastic! It’s the triumphant return of Han Solo! So if you can tamp down your expectations, you will almost certainly enjoy it. At least for a couple hours.

* Whatever else you want to say about it, the movie does accomplish a number of corporate goals for the Star Wars franchise. First, it dispatches—entirely—with George Lucas’s disastrous prequels, which J. J. Abrams has successfully pushed down the memory hole. Everything about Force Awakens—from the cinematography to the design elements to the score—pledges allegiance to the original trilogy.

And that was the film’s first mission: To tell audiences that this movie will be like those movies, only a little bit different. Which is why the first shot of the movie is of a star destroyer gliding onscreen—only this time entering from the bottom-left corner of the frame, rather than the top-right. It’s why the movie opens on a desert planet that looks an awful lot like Tatooine. It’s why Abrams returns us to the main characters from the original trilogy—but uses them to introduce four new characters.

* One of these new characters—Kylo Ren—is actually very compelling! Ren is the most complicated, and possibly the most interesting character of franchise. When Ren gets bad news from the New Jack Admiral Ozzel, he doesn’t quietly force-choke the guy. He flips out and light-sabers a giant computer console. To my mind, this is the best written scene in the movie because it’s the first time that a character does something completely unexpected.

In fact, everything about Kylo Ren is unexpected. Instead of building his parentage—he’s the son of Han and Leia—as a big reveal, the script throws it away. And it can afford to do that because Ren has enough going on to make him internally compelling. He’s unlike all of the other Jedi and Sith we’ve seen—who are calm, methodical, and controlling—he’s impulsive, needy, maybe even a little bi-polar. At times he’s a ball of rage; at times he’s weirdly sensitive. And that’s because he has an internal struggle. But here, again, Ren subverts Star Wars expectations. We’re used to seeing good guys corrupted by evil. Ren is a bad guy being corrupted by a sliver of good.

And because this conflict is different than what we’ve seen before, the movie’s climactic scene—which is not the destruction of the starkiller base, or the meeting of Rey and Luke—is Ren’s killing of Han Solo. Because at that moment the audience genuinely doesn’t know what he’s going to do. The screenwriters (Abrams, Lawrence Kasdan, and Michael Arndt are all credited) unspooled the character so well that either choice—to come home, or kill his father—would have made sense. So his decision to kill his father is a gut punch, unsettling all the expectations we have for Star Wars movies.

* Which brings us to the next great thing about the movie: Han Solo. I’m not sure I like the choices that were made for Han’s character. The movie has him regressing from all the grown-up, adult growth he previously made in the series. But that’s almost beside the point because Harrison Ford is such a giant, charismatic movie star. He carries the movie from the moment he steps into the picture.

* One of the things that bothered me was how much Ford’s Solo overshadow Rey and Finn, the other two main new characters. At first, I thought that this was a problem of casting: That after reinvigorating Star Trek almost entirely on the strength of great casting—and doing amazing casting in everything he touched from Felicity to Alias to Mission Impossible: III—Abrams misfired with Daisy Ridley and John Boyega, who don’t have much presence. At all. (Adam Driver as Kylo Ren is a home run.)

You shouldn’t underestimate how important star power is. There’s a reason that Jennifer Lawrence, Chris Pratt, and Zoe Saldana are cast in every fifth movie these days. They’re movie stars. Ridley and Boyega are not.

And it wasn’t just leads where casting was off. In A New Hope you had the great Peter Cushing as Grand Moff Tarkin. In The Force Awakens you get a thin, insubstantial Domhnall Gleeson as the Tarkin analogue General Hux.

* As an aside, I actually like the idea that the while the Empire was run by old men, the First order is run by 30-year-olds. It makes sense that, in the aftermath of the conflagration that closes Return of the Jedi most of the military-aged men in the galaxy would be gone.

*But on further reflection, I don’t know that it’s fair to blame Ridley and Boyega—because their characters are terribly underwritten. As Max Landis correctly points out, Rey is basically the Star Wars version of John Cena. She’s omnicompetent. She has all of the answers to every situation she’s confronted with throughout the film. She’s never in any danger. Spoiler: She wins.

Finn might be worse. I like the idea of a Stormtrooper who grows a conscience. But you have to earn that switch and afterwards the character should have some larger motivation.

* There are . . . other problems. Besides casting. And the fact that, as the crew at Red Letter Media put it, the entire movie is derivative enough to be considered a soft-reboot, rather than a continuation, of the series. (A third Death Star? Yes, a third Death Star.) There are plot holes. How many? Sonny Bunch has a running list. It’s a doozy.

* Unlike Sonny, I’m not a heartless monster. I understand that you can pick just about any movie to death. My favorite plot hole in the series comes at the start of the speeder-bike chase in Jedi. As the stormtroopers are fleeing, Luke and Leia hop on a speeder-bike to pursue them. Luke tells Leia to “jam their comms.” She looks flustered. He then tells her to push a button on the center of the vehicle’s console. Which means that the Empire’s speeder-bikes were built with a feature to disrupt their own communication system?

But as Sonny points out, a great many of the holes in The Force Awakens are the result of writing that was either not honed sharply enough, or got so worked-over in committee that the end-result looks lazy. And those types of plot holes are the worst. Because they pull you out of the story as you’re watching it.

* And one of the plot holes does something a little more serious—it monkeys with the Star Wars canon. Here’s a friend of mine:

* But before I head back for a second viewing, one final note: In my ongoing defense of the Empire I’ve always maintained that the Rebellion’s lack of a post-war plan suggested that they would plunge the galaxy into anarchy. In The Force Awakens we see that the actual result was worse: The galaxy is being taken over by hard-line elements of the First Order who, compared with the Empire, seem to be really bad.

The Empire tried to impose order on a messy and illiberal galaxy through the credible threat of force. The First Order seeks to use actual force. And they seem to want not order, but something like extermination.

We now have something like proof that life for the average citizen in the Star Wars universe would have been better off if the rebellion had failed.