Star Wars: The Force Awakens
Director: J.J.
Abrams
Writers: Lawrence
Kasdan, J.J. Abrams, Michael Arndt
Starring: Harrison
Ford, Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, Adam Driver, Oscar Isaac, Carrie
Fisher, Mark Hamill
Rating: Three and a
half stars out of five
Available in every
theater in the country.
[Spoiler alert for
people who think knowing the premise of a movie before seeing it is
somehow akin to having their first-born child stolen from them. No
other major and/or surprising plot points will henceforth be ruined
for you.]
From the first line
of its opening crawl, Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens
is, at its core, a story about searching for Luke Skywalker. This
is not like the original trilogy of George Lucas's space opera saga,
about Luke's metaphorical journey to discover who he is and how he
fits in the universe. He is literally missing. People are scouring
the galaxy far, far away to find him. The hunt for the now elderly
Jedi master provides The Force Awakens with the bones of its
plot, the gunshot at the start of a two-hour sprint full of spirited
fun, butterflies-in-the-stomach reunions, wit, sadness, the works.
But the
search-and-rescue or search-and-destroy missions, depending on which
side gets to Luke first, too often get sidetracked by a threat larger
in physical size but smaller in dramatic heft than the movie's
mission statement. The planet-destroying device that provides the
action-oriented climax of the film is an overly familiar plot
callback to previous entries in the Star Wars universe. It is
unconnected to the characters in any way beyond them having empathy
for the loss of innocent lives – when the device is activated, it
blows up a planet none of the principle characters have any emotional
ties to. It's a missed opportunity by not dovetailing the search for
Luke with the destructive spectacle. Its colossal murder rate could
have been used as a guilt inducer to drive Luke out of hiding, or he
could have secretly been stowed away on it while working to disable
its power, or it could have been a pure punishment meant to destroy
any possible hiding place for Luke. But no, it's there for some neat
action setpieces, although one of those setpieces includes an
emotional confrontation that works like gangbusters – it could have
been part of a set of simultaneous emotional confrontations and
revelations, though. Its functionality is deficient and it leaves
some gaps in dire need of some connective tissue.
But The Force
Awakens, as written by director J.J. Abrams and Empire Strikes
Back screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan, understands that does
not need to hinge on its plot. It is better for that realization,
because, like Disney's other 2010s pop culture behemoth, the Marvel
Cinematic Universe, The Force Awakens knows it is a character
piece, an introduction to new people in a stimulating situation, with
some familiar faces on board to ease the transition.
Those people, and
the ways they bounce off one another, are the soul of this go-round.
The newbies are, one and all, shockingly for a series that has always
had difficulty with this even in its finest moments, distinct and
fully formed people. As is to be expected in this nostalgia festival,
there are some personality similarities between them and the beloved
denizens of the original trilogy – but Abrams, Kasdan, and the
actors work to subvert the original's tropes. They put the
characterization blender on “high” and let motivations, worries,
and aspirations mix into something familiar but different enough to
be novel.
Daisy Ridley's Rey
has plenty of A New Hope-era Luke Skywalker in her, but she is
not someone longing for adventure in the stars. She has a
singleminded need for belonging, a pathological desire to return to
the home she has made for most of her life, the desert planet Jakku,
where she was abandoned by her family as a child. She cannot shake
the hope that they will return for her, and Ridley places an anxiety
within Rey – to paraphrase her performance, “This could be the
day they come back and I'll miss them!” – that shows she
fully understands the opportunity cost of doing the right thing. She
does it anyway, but that reluctance is central to her being.
The non-geriatric
male leads of The Force Awakens, Finn (John Boyega) and Poe
Dameron (Oscar Isaac) share some qualities with the Han Solo of old,
with their quick wittedness and the high esteem they have for
efficiency. However, Finn, as a Stormtrooper defecting from the First
Order (the Empire of the old movies), has something to lose. He's a
bit desperate. He's in over his head. His humor comes from a place of
nervousness, not Han's world weariness and Watergate-influenced 1970s
disillusion. Likewise with Resistance (the 30-years-later name for
the Rebel Alliance) pilot Poe, he's a true believer in the cause, man
– Isaac's eyes beam with pride when he gets to do anything to get
one over on the First Order. He cannot afford to be flippant with his
well being, because he has things to do and freedom to fight for.
Plus he's got his little buddy and copilot, the beach ball droid
BB-8, to live for.
Besides, why give
watered down retreads of the handsome rogue when you have him at your
disposal? Harrison Ford doesn't punt on his return to Han Solo after
30-plus years. He's still a rascal. He still has fun quarrels with
Chewbacca (Peter Mayhew). But he's seen some stuff in the three
decades since partying with the Ewoks on Endor. He's experienced real
loss, and it's hinted that he's largely responsible for that loss.
This isn't the same as him being a street smart orphan with a chip on
his shoulder – it appears his actions directly led to his current,
not always rosy situation. He's learned some hard lessons, and he's a
more careful person for them, more willing to accept the strangeness
of the world around him, and ever so slightly eager to help out the
plucky kids who are in hot water.
And in pursuit of
our heroes is a villain with some surprising issues, Kylo Ren (Adam
Driver). He's a guy who hasn't quite figured things out yet. He's
obsessed with Darth Vader and wants to climb the same peaks as that
half-machine Sith lord, but he has no clue how to do it. He lashes
out when he doesn't get his way, and his own lack of planning or
inability to execute causes continued frustration for him. He's an
unhinged sort. Driver plays that up with vocal inflections that, on
the surface, sound authoritative, but there's always a hint of
insecurity hanging over every word – this is difficult to
accomplish when a character wears a mask most of the time. His
insecurities grow stronger in the presence of First Order General Hux
(Domhnall Gleeson), a shouty-but-scarily-competent Hitler type who
seethes when he sees the flashy-but-messy Kylo Ren get the attention
he should. Hux is the obvious choice for First Order golden boy, but
either due to petulance or a lack of pizzazz, he simply doesn't get
the respect Kylo Ren does. Their posturing competition is a new
wrinkle to the Star Wars films, where a secondary character
like Hux, full of something other than fear of having his throat
crushed by a Darth Vader-like figure, would not have existed before.
This being one of
those Star Wars movies, though, there is action. It looks and
feels right, especially with a return to shooting on film after
Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith abandoned
celluloid for too-clean digitized pictures. Abrams does his thing
here, where he renders the texture of something old in a modern
package. He has the visual language of George Lucas's buddy Steven
Spielberg imprinted on his brain. While he is not the master of
putting the eye-popping images together in such a seemingly
effortless fashion that Spielberg or early period Lucas were, he is
still capable of crafting sweeping beauty. Particularly on Jakku,
there are wide shots of a fallen Star Destroyer, or a handful of TIE
Fighters screaming toward the camera with a setting sun behind them,
that could have been yanked straight from John Ford's Technicolor
Westerns.
The Force Awakens struggles
just a touch with shot-to-shot editing, particularly as it tries to
emulate A New Hope.
Some chase sequences fall on the side of abrupt rather than the
crispness of the original film – it's a slight but important
distinction. That is almost entirely due to the general evolution of
action editing since 1977 rather than the specific fault of editors
Maryann Brandon and Mary Jo Markey. It's hard to lay modernity on top
of the classicism of a nearly 40-year-old film – the translation
does not entirely compute here. Besides, the macro editing, the
pacing of the picture, is full of easy oomph. The movie hums along
without its two hours and 16 minutes being felt.
And that's Star Wars: The Force Awakens in a nutshell. It has trouble with
the nuts and bolts of storytelling at times, where a tweak here or a
purposeful overlap there could make it reach pop greatness. It's the
opposite of so many other action-adventure movies in that it gets a
little lost in A-to-B functionality, but it does the really hard
stuff well. It gets the audience to invest in the characters because
of their heart, their hurt, their humor. It bumps, it fizzes, it
flashes. It's Star Wars.
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