[Review] Star Wars : The Force Awakens

Spoiler Warning : Major Spoilers For The Entire Movie

Well, I just got back from watching The Force Awakens, and it was exactly what I expected from J.J. Abrams : an entertaining movie with an utterly nonsensical plot. In short, it was a worthy successor to Revenge of The Sith - better than the Prequel Trilogy, and not nearly as good as the Originals.

I’m not going to pretend that I’m unbiased - by the time The Force Awakens was half done, I was already thoroughly disappointed. That may well have prejudiced me against the rest of the movie…but some of the stupidest parts came in the second half.

The Force Awakens did a lot of things well. The action scenes were exciting, and most of the characters were compelling. It seems like almost everyone loved this movie, so there’s no point in me retreading old ground by praising the good parts. Instead, I’m going to focus on the flaws, notable or otherwise.

The Timeline Is All Fucked Up

The Force Awakens is very vague when it comes to backstory, so let’s lay out what we know for sure:

a) It takes place about 30 years after Return Of The Jedi

b) Luke went into seclusion after his nephew, Ben Solo, was seduced by the Dark Side, screwing up his plans to revive the Jedi Order

c) The First Order “rose from the ashes of the Empire,” but only after Luke vanished

d) Finn, who is about 20 years old, was kidnapped by the First Order as a child, and trained to be a Stormtrooper

Anyone else see a problem with that? Let’s say that TFA takes place 35 years after ROTJ, which would make Ben/Kylo Ren 34 years old, at most (he’s played by Adam Driver, who is 32). How old was he when he destroyed the new Jedi Order? Surely a whiny teenager couldn’t be a real threat to Luke Skywalker! Let’s be generous, and say that he embraced the Dark Side at the age of 20, roughly 15 years before TFA.

The First Order entry on Wikipedia says that it began as a splinter faction of the Galactic Empire, but that doesn’t seem to be supported by the movie itself. Even if we grant that it has been around ever since ROTJ, the opening crawl of TFA makes it absolutely clear that First Order only became prominent after Luke disappeared. That means they’ve been a significant power for about 15 years…which means they kidnapped Finn, among many others, 4 or 5 years before they had any real power.

Think about the thought process there. “Well, we’re on the verge of defeat, and we definitely need more soldiers. We could continue to use a mixture of conscripts and volunteers, or we could go back to using clones, or we could use droids, or we could mount a massive effort to kidnap infants, devote enormous quantities of resources to training them, and hope that they might be effective soldiers in a couple of decades.”

This new kind of Stormtrooper seems to be inspired by the Ottoman Janissaries, but the context is entirely different. What worked well for the newly-established Ottoman Empire wouldn’t work for a military force fighting a desperate holding action.

Before we move on, there’s one more timeline issue that we have to deal with. The Original Trilogy was all about the struggle between the Dark Side of the Force and the Light Side, between the Sith and the Jedi. TFA introduces Snoke, who is apparently “very powerful in the dark side,” and who must have been around during the Original Trilogy, possibly as an Imperial officer.

Having another Dark Jedi hanging around at the same time as Darth Vader either greatly diminishes the importance of the events in the Original Trilogy, or comes off as absurd - “Oh, yeah, he was there the whole time, but you never saw him, and he didn’t have any impact on anything.”

How In The Hell Did These First Order Jerks Get So Powerful?

OK, so let’s look back about 15 years. A relatively minor Imperial faction, led by some douche named Snoke, joins forces with rogue Jedi adolescent Ben Solo, who just betrayed Luke Skywalker. They use Imperial symbols, declare war on the rest of the Galaxy, and apparently they’ve been going around kidnapping children en masse.

That should be a recipe for an immediate smack-down. The entire goddamn Galaxy should have come down on these First Order dickheads like a ton of neutronium. You can’t even compare them to the Nazis, who were ignored by the world for far too long, because the First Order was already at war with the entire damn Galaxy, and had been fighting them for more than a decade.

Instead of wiping out the First Order, the Republic secretly backs a small force called the Resistance to fight them. No part of that makes any sense. The Republic was openly attacked by the First Order, who are openly evil, so why do they have to defend themselves secretly? Why can they only provide the Resistance with a handful of fighters? Why is it even called the “Resistance”? Does J. J. Abrams not know what that word implies, or even what it means?

Of course, maybe that’s literally all the Republic could provide - maybe the situation was just as desperate as the plot of TFA seems to imply. Unfortunately, that completely undermines the Original Trilogy. Instead of ROTJ ending with “Yay, we beat the Empire and restored peace & freedom to the Galaxy,” we’re left with “Yay, we beat part of the Empire, but we’re going to spend the next 15 years fighting a brutal war that grinds our fleet down to a fraction of its current strength, which will leave us completely vulnerable to the Empire 2.0”.

Hereditary Uselessness

Ben/Kylo is obsessed with Darth Vader, but he is far more like Anakin Skywalker. They’re both whiny, pathetic little assholes, and neither of them can be taken seriously as villains. Kylo Ren is little more than a petulant child, a boy dressing up in his grandfather’s suit. I can accept, in theory, that he managed to throw a wrench in Luke’s plans, but I flat-out can’t accept him as a threat to the Galaxy.

This appearance is only amplified by the rest of the First Order. They’re a bunch of young people using modified Imperial equipment, carrying out vaguely-defined “evil”. They’re a group of poseurs, a cabal of hipsters led by a wannabe Sith Lord.

Skill? Training? The Force Cares Not About These Things

Towards the end of TFA, Finn manages to hold his own against Kylo Ren in a lightsaber duel. Think about that for a second : a Stormtrooper with virtually no combat experience does reasonably well against a Dark Jedi who has at least a decade of training.

Right after that, Rey, who has never used a lightsaber, beats Kylo in another duel. At one point, she and Kylo are both trying to pull a saber with the Force, and she wins, even though this is the first time she’s ever used the Force that way.

I just watched the entire Original Trilogy a few days ago, which makes TFA seem even more absurd. Luke didn’t use the Force to summon his lightsaber until The Empire Strikes Back, 3 years after he became a Jedi. Even then, he had more trouble with it than Rey did! The dueling part is even worse - after years of experience with lightsabers, and intense training with both Obi-Wan and Yoda, Luke was barely able to take on Darth Vader, and never really beat him. Either Rey is the best Jedi ever, a hundred times more powerful than Luke, or Kylo Ren is the worst Sith ever. Or none of this movie makes any fucking sense.

Look, there are a few other problems I have with The Force Awakens, but quite frankly, I can’t work up the enthusiasm to write them down. The Force Awakens just isn’t worth the effort.