Star Wars: A New Theory
The possibility of successfully predicting this movie is approximately three thousand seven hundred and twenty to one.
This was actually written immediately after seeing ‘The Force Awakens’ on opening night, and I just never published it. I guess it’s now or never! I intentionally have steered clear of any and all information about the new film, so this is probably a good way to refresh before seeing ‘Last Jedi’.
Take one mythically awesome trilogy, trim away any excess prequel schlock, add modern sensibilities, and mix. Voila, you’ll have yourself one The Force Awakens. The new film does an incredible job of mixing the old with the new, but the question on many people’s lips is “Who Is Rey?”. It’s a great question, and to figure it out, we’ll need to obsessively analyze virtually every other character, moment, and setting in the new movie. JJ has gone out of his way to create a new film which redistributes the character traits and personalities that made the original trilogy so successful to create his fresh story in this universe of long ago (and far far away of course).
The force is strong with this one
Let’s start with Rey herself. She’s obviously an analogue for Luke Skywalker in A New Hope. She, like Luke, is a natural pilot who is effectively an orphan living on a desert world with a dead end job. Her potent, latent force force abilities lay dormant and rapidly grow throughout the film. She wears light colored cottony-robes and carries the infamous Anakin saber. Sound familiar?
Next up is Finn. If you’re a die-hard SW fan with knowledge of the non-film universe, you know that Han Solo was originally an imperial who abandoned his unit when his orders crossed over the line from uncomfortable into unconscionable. He fell in with the rebellion accidentally when his love of his friends outweighed his desire to escape the powerful entities chasing him. He’s a fast-talking, dark-clothes-wearing, rogue who leaves our initial desert-planet setting of Tatooine with Luke, but has ulterior motives. Alright, so replace Han with Finn, Luke with Rey, and Tatooine with Jakku, and we see that Finn is pretty obviously meant to be Rey’s Han Solo.
But wait, Han Solo, the scruffy-looking nerf-herder himself, is actually in The Force Awakens. If Finn is this new trilogy’s Han, who is Han? Well lets see, he’s old and wise, tells our new Hero and Rogue character that the force is real, and he lays down his life symbolically in a lightsaber battle while everyone watches. HE’S OBI-WAN PEOPLE.
This leads us directly to Kylo Ren, badass emo kid extraordinaire who rips all of our hearts out when he strikes down his old man (who won’t actually become more powerful than he could ever imagine because, y’know, he’s not a Jedi). The film is fairly explicit with Ren’s aspirations to Vaderdom, he wears basically the same costume, has Vader’s helmet in a shrine, and flat out says he wants to be like Vader but better. If all this wasn’t enough for you to get it, we get to see Kylo force choke his minions and threaten imperial suits. We’re even treated to an inverted “…your father” moment when Snoke asks Ren if he can handle confronting Solo. They are really trying to hammer this one home.
One new character’s relationship to their original trilogy equivalent is a bit subtler. Maz Katana in particular may take a watch or two to pick up on, so let’s break it down. She’s a short wrinkled wise alien who sees right through people and tries to guide our Hero through a disturbing force vision. Sound like someone we’ve met before, does she?
There are a few other characters but this is getting tedious so here they are all together. Leia is the new Mon Mothma, Phasma is the new Boba Fett (looks cool but does nothing), and BB-8 is the new R2 (duh). Poe seems to be a Biggs Darklighter analogue with bits of Han mixed in, but he wasn’t really developed in this film, so it’s tough to say. Oh, and Snap Wexley is clearly the new Jek Porkins (sorry Greg Grunberg).
A Long Time Ago
First of all, Star Wars is not science fiction, it’s fantasy. If you’re reeling right now, take a breath, and then read this:
Our story starts with a farm boy, he has big dreams but is going nowhere. The princess’s messenger (and her fool) ask him to take up a quest to find the white wizard. The white wizard tells the farm boy he needs to learn magic and help him rescue the princess. They seek aid from a rogue who helps them storm the castle and rescue the princess from the black knight. Then they knock down the black knight’s castle castle.
It doesn’t take Lo-Bot to figure out that this is the story of A New Hope, which shows us that Star Wars is in fact a fantasy story in a scifi setting. George Lucas intended for the prequels to be a sort of mirror of the original story line, most likely because this would make him the most money, but also because it makes in-universe sense. The Force guides all things within the world of Star Wars, and it has a way of balancing and repeating itself. JJ seems to be taking a cue from Darth Merchandising in that The Force Awakens obviously parallels A New Hope in many aspects, but it also breaks away in some respects. The film opens on a desert world with our bedraggled hero who then meets the rogue, and the wise old man, but then we jump ahead to the sequence in Maz’s cantina which seems to parallel Luke’s first time at Yoda’s hut (our Hero has a vision, gets advice, ignores it, pays the price).
There are many other half-repetitions throughout the film. In A New Hope Luke and Han infiltrate the Death Star by pretending to be stormtroopers. In The Force Awakens, Finn, a stormtrooper, pretends to be a resistance fighter. The attack on Starkiller Base is so reminiscent of the attack on the second Death Star that the writers felt the need to hang a lantern on it, but when the base is blown up, rather than the traditional kaboom and shockwave of destruction we’re used to, the planet’s death creates a new sun.
The future…the past. Old friends long gone
The point of all this is that by mapping the characters and plotlines of the new film to the old, we can speculate as to where the next film might take us.
Let’s start with the obvious: at the end of The Force Awakens, Kylo Ren is left injured by lightsaber above a pool of lava. It would be unsurprising if we see him further along the path to Vaderdom in the next film, possibly more man than machine, possibly just a little more machine, probably more pissed than not.
Finn is going to be fine. First of all the audience loves him, second of all, he’s our Rogue character left in a suspended state at the end of the movie. If we’ve learned anything from ‘The Carbonite Incident’ it’s that he’s gonna pop right back up.
We’re gonna see more Maz. She will probably be stopping by to drop off more kernels of enigmatic wisdom that our Hero will probably ignore until she gives herself up for some noble cause.
The question of Rey’s parentage is a complex one, but it does seem extremely plausible that Luke Skywalker is her daddy. Her accent is distinctly British, which in the Star Wars universe usually means Imperial. Since Luke is not an Imp, this may mean that the new film is drawing from one of the storylines that was obliterated in the great Disneyfication of 2014, specifically the one where Luke falls in love with and marries Mara Jade, ex imperial dark jedi and assassin for the emperor. There’s also a lot of material from the interrogation scene where Kylo is trying to draw information out of Rey. In that scene, Kylo sees an island in the middle of a great ocean, which happens to be a fitting description for the location where Luke is found at the end of the film. Is he calling out to her? Maybe. There’s also an easy-to-miss line that may be setting up for one of our bizarro-parallelisms in the next film.
In that interrogation scene, Kylo says “I feel it too, don’t be afraid”, and he seems to be referring to some attraction between the two of them. Yes, yes, that is super weird if Rey is Luke’s daughter because that would make Kylo Ren, aka Ben Solo, aka Leia Skywalker son, Rey’s cousin. Gross! But wait, A New Hope contained obvious sexual tension (and gross kissing) between characters whom we did not discover were brother and sister until the second film. This is EXACTLY the kind of not-quite mirroring event we’ve seen so far.
Lastly, during Rey’s vision, we hear a voice telling her to wait….and it sounded a heck of a lot like The Joker Luke Skywalker.
Ultimately, we cant know until ‘Last Jedi’ comes out, and J.J. is notoriously difficult to predict. Since, in my opinion, there’s no such thing as luck, just remember that if I got all this wrong, it’s not my fault.
