Five things I loved about Force Awakens and five things I really didn’t
****Spoilers****
Oh… my… gods… so many spoilers… If you are reading this and you haven’t seen the film, close your browser now!!
I’ve seen Force Awakens precisely once; and I want to see it again. Firstly, because I enjoyed it and would love to go on that ride again. Secondly, because I still feel conflicted about it and I want to try to figure out what I actually think of the movie.
There are things about it I adored and there are things about it that made me roll my eyes. I seem to be in a significant minority about this, so to explain my feelings to the people who have asked, I’ve distilled my thoughts into the five parts of the movie I loved and the five parts of the movie I had some significant questions about.
These are just thoughts, not even opinions, and I expect and hope to answer these questions for myself on subsequent viewings. Regardless, here goes:
Light side — Daisy Ridley
Scifi actor David Blue summed up my feelings the other day when he tweeted simply:
It’s not just that she’s adorable, though she is; and it’s not just her amazing performance, though it is amazing. Her character effortlessly moves from feral wild child to charming dork to intergalactic badass over the course of the movie, and it’s wonderful. She’s not just a “strong female character” either. She’s foolish, she’s naive, she’s weak, she’s brave and she’s the hero, all at once. She’s simply a marvellously-written character who happens to be female.
Best of all is the delightful switcheroo that Abrams pulls. Rey rejects Luke’s lightsaber and runs away, getting captured and leaving Finn to come rescue her. Finn does and squares up to Ren, which would be the point most movies would have him discover his hidden force powers and save the day. Instead, he gets his ass kicked and the female lead has to step in to save the male lead, setting herself up as the new hero of the franchise and leaving Finn as her sidekick.
Suddenly, dorky, soft-hearted girls can be heroes. It’s simply the best thing that’s happened in a film in as long as I can remember and I will forgive the new trilogy any number of sins in return. Still…
Dark side — Kylo Ren
What the hell is going on with Kylo Ren? He’s the new Anakin Skywalker; a whining Darth Vader fanboy so pathetic that I suspect he’s actually a potshot at Star Wars fandom in general. He initially comes across as a badass who can stop blaster shots with a wave of his hand, but quickly descends into Kevin The Teenager, having full-on lightsaber tantrums whenever things don’t go his way.
This from the franchise that brought us what was perhaps the greatest villain in cinematic history. At one point in Empire Strikes Back, Vader’s minions allow the Falcon to escape to hyperspace and Vader’s simple double take is enough to make you realise the minions are seriously screwed. Abrams even managed to find a practical use for the crazy crossguard lightsaber, but failed miserably to make Ren in any way intimidating.
This is far from Adam Driver’s fault. He’s a magnificent actor — a young Alan Rickman, which seems karmic since Alan Rickman was 44 when he got his big break in Die Hard. Unfortunately, someone seems to have noticed this and turned Ren into Snape Junior. His mannerisms, haircut and even his outfit, when he takes off the hooded cloak in the latter half of the movie, seem patterned on Snape. Appropriate for the film’s main villain whose familial relation to the young hero seems likely to lead to his eventual redemption, if only before his likely death in the final reel of the third film — hardly original.
Speaking of his outfit, what is it with the helmet anyway? He doesn’t need it for armour, or life support like Vader, so why is he wearing it throughout? It’s not as if Driver looks anything like Ford or Fisher, so he didn’t need to conceal his identity from the audience. Was it simply so Abrams could troll us about Ren’s identity; or was it just to copy Vader? For a film that so expertly walks the tightrope between fan service and pointless divergence, this seems lazy.
Light side — John Boyega
Matching Ridley, John Boyega is yet another charming dork, making him utterly appealing as a new hero of the franchise. The joy of the new duo is that they’re both geeky losers who end up saving the galaxy through simple kindheartedness and bravery.
Even more wonderful than this, however, is the fact that Boyega’s race is as irrelevant to the story as his shoe size. Yeah, he’s black, and, yeah, he’s romancing a white girl, but nobody in a galaxy far, far away gives a flying monkey about the colour of his skin and holy hell that’s just how it should be. Given that this movie has already broken box office records, with any luck, the colour of an actor’s skin will become as meaningless to Hollywood as it clearly is to the audience.
Amusingly, Finn is a double f-you to Kevin Smith from JJ Abrams. Not only is Finn a former Stormtrooper sanitation worker, spoiling Smith’s joke in Clerks by his own admission, but it completely reverses Smith’s sarcastic monologue from Chasing Amy too. While Vader, “the blackest brother in the galaxy” turns out to be a “feeble, crusty, old white man”, Finn’s an evil, white-armoured Trooper, who casts off his outfit to reveal a heroic black guy.
Dark side — The minor villains
Abrams promised us a minimum of CGI in the new movies, so it’s horrendous that our supposed Big Bad looks like something from a 90s video game, but half as dangerous. Serkis actually looks more impressive in the photo above than the final effect. The Emperor in Strikes Back may have looked so bad that Lucas felt compelled to fix the effect, but at least he implied some menace. Everything from Supreme Leader Snoke’s sub-golem appearance to his cliché dialogue and, above all else, his stupid name, make him feel like a character from crap fanfic.
Even worse, I was really looking forward to Gwendoline Christie kicking ass as Captain Phasma. She had two scenes and about three lines, vanishing for half the movie when it would make sense for her to be there, didn’t fire a shot, got captured and apparently ended up in a trash compactor. Weak.
Lastly, General Hux is high up the credits and Abrams talks about him a lot, but what point does he even have in the plot? He doesn’t do anything. Maybe they’ll be filled out later, but these are three scant sketches of villains who have no reason to be in the film.
Light side — Poe Dameron
Poe Dameron; what a guy. The resistance’s greatest fighter pilot is also their top agent, who’ll charge down a battalion of Stormtroopers and a Sith Lord, but when a Stormtrooper decides to switch sides, he’ll be like “great. Let’s be besties.” He has very little to do in the story, but he’s still a cracking character, written with truckloads of charm…
Dark side — Oscar Isaac
…shame he’s horrifically underplayed.
Don’t get me wrong, I love Oscar Isaac. At the risk of starting a controversial tangent, Sucker Punch is one of my favourite films and Isaac’s smarmy pimp is deliciously loathsome, particularly when performing a burlesque version of Love Is The Drug with Carla Gugino. His turn as Poe, however, is so phoned in he might as well be a hologram. Check out his touching reunion with BB-8 where he shouts “my friend!” with all the enthusiasm of a man in the third hour of a Christmas family update call from his mum.
Allegedly, Isaac was already committed to X-Men when he was offered Poe, so you can’t blame him for not having 100% to give, or for not turning down Star Wars for anything, of course. Hopefully the sequels will see Poe Dameron having more to do and Isaac giving him more presence.
Light side — Mark Hamill
This is how you do a cameo. For all the teasing, for all the hints, it comes down to a simple, dialogue-free glimpse at Mark Hamill, who looks for all the world like a broken, aged Luke Skywalker. He acts the hell out of that shot and his mere presence opens up a world of possibilities for the new franchise. Finn is in the Resistance, Rey is the new captain of the Falcon — with Chewie as her sidekick — and Luke’s new apprentice, while an eviler, more-powerful Kylo Ren looms on the horizon. Glorious.
Dark side — Harrison Ford
Wait… wait… don’t lynch me…
Ford’s appearance in the trailers is what convinced me the new movies were worth getting excited about in the first place, and it was sheer glee seeing him back.. at first…
You see, it’s clear from the film that they had no idea whether Ford would come back or not. As such, his involvement in the plot is utterly minimal. The idea that Solo would lose the Falcon for 15 years is ridiculous, particularly given where he has apparently been living since, but it’s made even more so by the fact that he finds it instantly when the plot requires it. The entire subsequent escapade aboard his freighter does nothing for the film other than expand its run time and Finn and Rey were actually on a more-direct route to their goal without him.
Don’t get me wrong, the moment where he shoots a Stormtrooper without looking had me whooping in my seat, while his reunion with Leia put a tear in my eye, but it all felt very tacked on and meaningless to the core plot. Imagine if Finn and Rey had gone where BB-8 told them, found Maz Kanata, who takes Finn to the Resistance when Rey is kidnapped, they tell them Kylo Ren is Leia and Solo’s son, then Finn teams up with some resistance fighters to rescue Rey. Solo doesn’t need to be in the film at all.
The fact that he is so crowbarred in then makes it even more annoying that they promptly kill Solo off. The point seems to be to make us realise how evil Kylo Ren is, but since we’ve never seen him being anything but a bastard, there’s not much logic to this. It may be an emotional send off for Solo, but I still can’t work out what it has to do with this movie’s story.
Light side — The story
My feelings about this film almost exactly mirror my feelings about Abrams’ Star Trek reboot. I didn’t want to like the new Trek. I didn’t think a reboot was needed and it moved far away from what I loved about old Trek. However, I had to admit that the movie was actually tremendous fun, and the sacrifices it made brought Trek back from the dead. It was a necessary evil.
Star Wars needed to move forward from Lucas. The prequels made it clear that he could no longer make great Star Wars movies, and Force Awakens is better than any of the prequels. Still, it feels like a new thing, in and of itself, rather than a continuation of the saga, while the prequels, for all their faults, felt very much like Star Wars.
In Force Awakens, the Force works differently, the lightsabers work differently, the baddies are different, the goodies are different, the EU has been dumped, Lucas’ running themes and cod philosophy have been dumped, the returning cast all look so old they don’t even resemble themselves… For good or ill, Force Awakens comes across like a new film massively ripping off Star Wars, not a Star Wars film.
Still, just as I don’t want to like the Trek reboot, I have to admit it was made the right way. Force Awakens may feel far more like an Abrams movie than a Star Wars movie, but it is a good movie, nonetheless.
Dark side — The story
However, Abrams movies tend to have a terribly-cavalier attitude to plotting. Just like Star Trek, Force Awakens is filled with implausible coincidences and gaping plot holes, as well as some plain-old misjudged silliness.
To finish up, let’s just rattle through some of the more-insane plotting choices:
- So Luke’s plan was to disappear for eternity, but to leave a map to where he went in two parts, one with Max von Sydow and one in Artoo, who is set to standby mode until, what, a heart monitor implanted in Han stops registering his pulse? Because #YOLO?
- Why are the First Order after Luke anyway? He’s not helping the Resistance, so what do they care? More importantly, how do they know that Dameron is on Jakku or that Sydow has the map?
- Starkiller Base destroys an unspecified number of planets, including what appears to be the galactic capital, but everything is cool because the Resistance take it out? If someone nuked the United States, but we caught the guys who did it, would we all be celebrating? Also, wasn’t there a comment in there that the entire Republic fleet had been destroyed? How exactly are the Resistance going to stop the First Order with a few X-wings?
- Speaking of Starkiller Base, it doesn’t appear to move, but needs to consume a sun to charge up. So what sun did it consume to fire the first time? Was it a binary system?
- Speaking of the second shot, why didn’t the Resistance just evacuate that planet? They bailed out of Hoth pretty quick.
- Phasma ordered Finn to reconditioning, but he’s allowed to wonder the ship freely and report there when he likes?
- Ren’s Vader cosplay, as I said.
- Han’s sudden ability to find the Falcon. Has he just become senile and forgotten where he parked it? Has he been in orbit around Jakku for 15 years waiting for it to crop up?
- I could go on…
Don’t get me wrong, I have no issue with a film’s plot falling apart when you think too much about it — it doesn’t spoil your enjoyment — but for a film that’s had this much attention lavished on the script to have fuzzy character motivations and deus ex machina moments where plots only move forward through insane strokes of luck over intergalactic distances is almost inexcusable.
Abrams has said that they devised the whole concept of Artoo springing back to life to soften the blow of what happened to Solo, but having random events occur just to manipulate the audience’s emotions without spending the time to work out a reason for it to happen isn’t writing. Under that principle, you could just throw a load of images of cute puppies up on the screen. Why have a plot at all?
Of course, a lot of these issues might be addressed or completely overturned by the sequels, and the truth is that this is a movie with so much momentum behind it that it needs a lot of rewatching and decoding. I completely reserve the right to disagree with myself on any of these issues in the future, and you are welcome to do so right now.
Overall, Force Awakens wasn’t a failure. Time will tell if it was a success.
