Why I loved The Force Awakens, but also hated it

Spoilers inbound.

When I first saw Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, I loved it. I was part of the film’s target audience; a 9 year-old who enjoyed light saber battles, had no concept of bad acting, and laughed in blissful ignorance at racial caricatures stepping in poop. Effectively, I was the little boy from Season 2, Episode 2 of Spaced, who went to a comic book shop to buy a Jar Jar Binks doll only to be less-than-amicably greeted by Tim Bisley, a 25-ish year-old man who grew up watching (and loving) the original Star Wars trilogy:

Tim Bisley: You are so blind! You so do not understand! You weren’t there at the beginning! You don’t know how good it was, how important! This is it for you! This jumped-up firework display of a toy advert! People like you make me sick! What’s wrong with you? Now, I don’t care if you’ve saved up all your 50p’s, take your pocket money and get out! 
[the little boy runs out, crying] 
Tim Bisley: What a prick.

Now that I’m Tim Bisley’s age, I understand the betrayal felt by Star Wars fans when The Phantom Menace was released. I have seen the Red Letter Media prequel reviews, the “What Ifs?” people have imagined, and Patton Oswalt’s bits on Episodes I-III. I have rewatched the prequels many times and been astonished by their inanity and unrepentant fan service. And my generation has had its own opportunities to gasp in horror at a beloved trilogy’s tarnishing-by-prequelization; The Hobbit was an undiluted mess, rising in no moment to the epic prowess of Lord of the Rings. I am become Tim Bisley.

So the stakes could not be higher for the long-awaited Episode VII to reclaim Star Wars’s former glory. To recapture moments of sheer joy, terror, and redemption. Han and Luke reuniting at the end of A New Hope, Darth Vader appearing in Cloud City in The Empire Strikes Back, and Darth Vader’s atonement at the end of Return of the Jedi are all such moments, and fans have been yearning for more.

And in these regards, The Force Awakens is successful. It is dutifully nostalgic and full of intense emotional scenes, with viewers feeling sympathetic to the characters they’re watching. I am happy to admit I cried pretty much through the entire film. And it’s very gratifying to watch a mainstream movie that boasts a woman and black man as its chief action heroes. I loved The Force Awakens because it listened to fans of the originals, emphasizing bonds between characters along with the themes and aesthetics of Episodes IV-VI.

However, this emphasized the originals’ story to a point I would argue is far beyond the realm of homage; it’s a carbon copy of the original trilogy. Though I managed to avoid any spoilers besides the theory that Kylo Ren was Han and Leia’s son, I had already borne witness to every spoiler I could have wanted simply by having already seen the original trilogy. And so, I hated The Force Awakens because it is a reiteration of stories that have already been told, and worst of all, they’ve been told, scene by scene, in the very same overarching storyline.

So let’s play a game. I’m going to describe the first few scenes of a movie in fairly rich detail, and you guess what movie I’m describing.

A huge, arrowhead-shaped spaceship flies ominously across the backdrop of a planet. A regiment of storm troopers flood onto a scene, allegedly searching for data critical to their aims. The data is stored inside an astromech droid that flees the scene before being apprehended. After quelling the good guys in a skirmish of blaster fire, a terrifying figure dressed in black robes appears and uses the Force to interrogate one of the good guys as to the whereabouts of the data.

If you guessed either A New Hope or The Force Awakens, congratulations! You are correct.

Let’s play again, now with a new scene:

Our protagonists include a renegade, an incipient Jedi from a desert planet, and Chewbacca. After penetrating their enemy’s lair, they watch as the Jedi’s father figure attempts to suade a Sith Lord into coming back to the light side of the Force. The Sith Lord kills said father figure, who, incidentally, was once a father figure to the Sith himself. The renegade, the Jedi, and Chewbacca then escape the lair, with the Jedi now furnished with the perfect motivation for vengeance.

Once again, this could describe either Luke’s agony watching Obi-Wan Kenobi dying by Darth Vader’s hand or Han Solo dying to Kylo Ren’s. Han is the renegade in A New Hope, and Finn assumes that role in The Force Awakens. Rey, obviously, is Luke. Chewbacca is Chewbacca. There has been a change in some character’s names, but virtually no change in the story.

The similarities don’t stop there. Luke is the new Yoda, having exiled himself after a young Jedi is seduced by the Dark Side. Rey seeks Luke out just as Luke sought out Yoda before her. And The Force Awakens strongly hints that Rey is Luke’s daughter, which opens the door to a nearly identical scenario to the iconic scene in which Darth Vader reveals his fatherhood to Luke. Except in this new trilogy, the reveal would be that Kylo Ren is Rey’s cousin.

I could easily give many more examples of these parallels; even the opening scrawl of text in both films essentially replaces “Empire” with “First Order” and “Rebellion” with “Resistance”. And this is The Force Awakens’s chief sin; it represents a complete lack of change. Even after the events of Episodes IV-VI, everything is pretty much exactly the same as it was at the beginning of A New Hope.

Despite copying many elements from their predecessors, the prequels at least presented viewers with a different political climate, aesthetic, and set of characters — not particularly interesting characters, but different characters nonetheless. The Force Awakens almost renders the original trilogy pointless, as though the events that took place in them had no effect on the galaxy whatsoever. Why watch The Force Awakens, then, when you can just watch A New Hope instead? History repeats itself, certainly, but why tell the same story twice?

I’ve spoken with people who write off The Force Awakens’s many parallels to A New Hope as “references”. I digress: The monster chess hologram in the Millenium Falcon is a reference. The mention of a trash compactor is a reference. Calling the new Death Star the “Starkiller” is a reference to Luke’s original name: “Luke Starkiller”. Replicating nearly every plot point in A New Hope, however, is at best laziness. At worst, it’s plagiarism.

The Star Wars expanded universe contains multitudes of stories about the Jedi New Order. There are many interesting routes that Luke Skywalker’s family could take after the events of Return of the Jedi, and virtually none of these were explored in The Force Awakens. The only hint of reference to the expanded universe’s storylines is Kylo Ren, who essentially reproduces the story of Jacen Solo, a son of Han and Leia who turns to the Dark Side. Besides this story element, none of the myriad stories explored in the expanded universe were plumbed for content, and I would say the writers were remiss not to do so. And with that said, I don’t consider The Force Awakens a sequel to Return of the Jedi, but rather an excellent remake of A New Hope. I just hope its sequels don’t make the same mistake because filling The Empire Strikes Back’s shoes will be far harder.