Sigh.

This is not going to be a happy review of Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

I did not like the movie, hopefully that helps set the tenor of what is to follow. There will indeed be spoilers, but I will put them down in the second section of the review, where I start talking specifics. That section looks to have gotten siginificantly more… colorful… in terms of language as well, but I’ll provide plenty of warning before we get there, don’t worry :-j

First off, let me make clear the over-arching reason that I did not enjoy the movie, and make some pronouncements regarding its overall worth as opposed to my own feelings about it.

I did not like the movie because it did not live up to my own very high hopes for Star Wars as a whole. That in and of itself does not make it bad, but it is kind of a big deal, and I will go into the specifics of why I think it hurts the rest of the movie a LOT in the spoiler section. Long story short, it was really well written, very well acted, very well shot, and pretty darn well paced INSIDE of the individual scenes. That should make it a great movie, and it really is very highly recommended for people that are not big Star Wars fans. A lot of people that I am very close to really liked it, and I can’t fault their reasoning.

However…

Looking at what it COULD have been casts a much more dubious haze on what it is. There were so many missed opportunities of such a magnitude that I think the movie on a whole should be subject to much more ire than it is. Granted, these missed opportunities are things that are rooted in the tangential stories in the Star Wars mythos – which Disney explicitly stated they would not be using – but that doesn’t dull the import and craft that went into them, and it certainly doesn’t make this new movie look good in comparison.

As many people have correctly stated, Star Wars is not Sci-Fi, it is Fantasy in Space. This is an important distinction, and one that I am intimately aware of. I would not want to try and force (no pun intended) the strictures of Star Trek or more scientifically sound media upon it. It absolutely needs to be fantastical and magical. The problem appears when that becomes the whitewash that covers up the real cultural significance of what Star Wars has become, dulling and in many cases trivializing what the franchise has been able to achieve, despite itself and its creator.

The new movie misses essentially every opportunity to build powerfully memorable characters, choosing to focus on the aesthetics of the setting as opposed to the philosophy of it. If the new movie is a renovation of the Star Wars house, what it has done, instead of making something livable and compelling is to paint over scratches in the walls and put slipcovers on the sofa. It makes the house look acceptable, but it does nothing to address the underlying issues in the foundation that need attention.

So, for a minute here, let’s step back into the world of the positive, before ending on another sour note.

As I mention, the movie does have serious strengths. The aesthetics that they have focused on truly have been done very well. The filmmakers made the right choice to move as far away from green screening as possible, and to cram people back inside ridiculous robot costumes that make equally absurd noises. The technology is thick and utilitarian, as it should be, and the sounds the ships make is glorious.

The acting is also fantastic. Ford’s Solo definitely suffers a bit from the weight of his own (both actor and character’s) success, but everyone does a fantastic job. The writing makes that possible, finally returning to something compelling and meaningful, and allowing the actors to do their job by leaving a lot UNsaid. There are strong female characters who actually make decisions, a good smattering of interesting aliens, and some nice fighting. It is an enjoyable film.

That is, it’s enjoyable if you aren’t into Star Wars.

Which brings me to the crux of why I did not like it. It is a movie made entirely for people who are on the periphery of the cultural dynamo that is Star Wars. It is bombastic to such an extent that the deeper import of the setting is lost completely, removing the biggest reason that Star Wars gained fame in the first place. It ignores what Star Wars has become to those who are its biggest fans, choosing to be a film that is dangerously separated from the core of its own success.

This is what JJ Abrams does. He makes fun, successful movies, but he does it in a way that shits all over the culture behind it. He is unrepentant about his aim to bring these franchises to the masses at the expense of the people who are deeply interested in them.

We will now begin talking about SPOILERS.

I’ll start slow, in case you accidentally made it down this far and have missed the big spoiler warning. To set the stage, I have read some of the Star Wars novels, I hate the prequels intensely, and I think George Lucas’s success with the original trilogy probably blew his entire creative wad. This new movie is better by far than the prequels, but it is NOT better than the original trilogy, because it doesn’t have an original idea in its head.

It is a reboot. It should have been made as a reboot. That is clearly what JJ Abrams does, he reboots stuff.

That is not what this is, though. It is not a reboot, so the degree of blatant mirroring of A New Hope is pathetic. A LITTLE BIT of mirroring would have been great, some familiar settings, familiar archetypes, perhaps a very minor plot twist… What we got is a movie that is so unoriginal that it is painful.

Even that, however, wouldn’t have made me dislike it as much as I did, if it had been simply unoriginal, that would have been unfortunate, but understandable.

The biggest problems really come down to three things:

1. The over-arching story is extremely poorly paced, and even though it blatantly re-uses the entire storyline from A New Hope, it does it far worse.
2. We lose one of the biggest characters in movie history to a caricature of an emo kid with essentially no background, no motivation, and no believability.
3. The movie’s scope is idiotically small, it misses out on nearly every real and meaningful opportunity to revitalize the series, and it fails to identify the Star Wars setting as a character in and of itself.

On to specifics.

1) Shitty re-hashed story.

I think everyone expected this new film to re-use a lot of the tropes of the original series. I mean, you have to, in order to make it feel like Star Wars. What many people did NOT expect was just how exactly The Force Awakens would match, character for character, plot point for plot point, A New Hope. It isn’t a complete resurrection from the dead, but it is a close enough copy to be depressing and incredibly annoying.

The central failure of the new movie is the inclusion of Death Star 3 in the plot. That single (albeit central) story element does more to ruin the pace and impact of the movie than any other. Pretty much everything else could have been forgivable by itself (BB-8, goddammit) if it weren’t for this idiotic and entirely ill-conceived central item. Let’s take a look at an abbreviated list of events surrounding this damn planetgun.

1. Death Star 3 shoots a few planets out of the sky. Just like the original Death Star. Plink! Man, look how evil these guys are! They killed a huge pile of people that we DON’T KNOW AT ALL and who we DO NOT CARE ABOUT AT ALL. At least there was a reason to destroy Alderaan, and there was actual fallout after it was done. Leia is connected to that planet intimately. Obi Wan FEELS it in his bones, because NOTHING like that has been done before. This time, billions die, and folks just sigh and say that they should probably do something about that.
2. The ‘Resistance’ meets up, and hilariously figures out a ‘plan’ to destroy this thing. I put ‘plan’ in quotes because what they come up with is so idiotic and useless I actually thought it was a joke while watching the movie in the theater. I was literally waiting for a punchline because the attack plan was such a failure waiting to happen. The only the worse would be if something that pathetic were to actually work, because that would mean that the evil First Order were even more useless and blind than the brute force Resistance.
3. A dozen X-Wings take off and shoot at a building, Han and a few folks tell a silver stormtrooper to turn off the shields. Both things WORK. The shields for an entire planet can be disabled by one squad commander type pushing a button. There isn’t even any question, she is supposed to be this evil leader, but she is worried about her OWN LIFE too much to think about what it would mean for the shields on the entire battle station to be off. The X-Wings meet a few Tie Fighters, shoot at some shit, and eventually blow up a building that is sitting on the surface, something that is absolutely integral to the function of the station. It is essentially a big red self-destruct button.
4. The idiotic resistance blows up the idiotic fucking self destruct button, and the planet turns into a little fireball.

WHY DOES THIS NEED TO BE IN THE MOVIE?!

It is such a failure of storytelling that it ruins any sense of purpose the characters might have been able to build, it takes up so much TIME that there is none left over to actually show us who these new characters ARE, and it is so unbelievable in its defense and application that it takes anyone with half a brain right out of the experience of watching a movie!

If it were removed, imagine what could have been in its place! There could have been a whole story about Kylo Ren chasing the intrepid heroes across the galaxy, showing a massive and diverse universe, letting us get to know EVERYONE, and showing us some actual human conflict, as opposed to a giant dumb shit ball of a planetgun.

The movie could have been about the force AWAKENING, it could have been about the characters and the audience learning about the universe, finding out what the galaxy is like, setting the stage for some really in depth movies to come. It failed miserably at this. The pacing of the movie was completely broken.

2) Adios Amigo.

In the biggest spoiler of this review, Han dies at the hands of his son.

Big deal, right? It should be huge, the most delicate and emotional part of the movie. Instead, since it is crammed in the middle of the attack on IdiotGun, it feels like a totally meaningless way to lose arguably the best character in Star Wars.

Han is a character we all know. He has a cultural momentum that is impossible to shake, and he doesn’t need motivation or explanation in the movie. Who DOES need background and motivation is Kylo Ren, who murders his father, han Solo. This little shit is NOTHING. We have no idea who he is, and the movie absolutely fails to portray him as anything but a half-assed Vader. I know that he has a back story, the movie SAYS that he does, and then proceeds to show bum-diddly-fucking-squat of it.

What ends up happening, is that the movie tells us a few things about Kylo Ren, shows us almost nothing, and then uses him as a goddamn crutch to try and extract some kind of emotional impact from a story that has absolutely none. The scene in which Han dies is actually GOOD, the tension is there, if there were any weight behing the characters as ALL it could have been great.

There was none. It was a failure. This is how we lose Han.

3) Where is the rest of the Galaxy?

The main characters stumble into the fucking Millenium Falcon and fly it into space. Han fucking LOST it. He lost the most easily recognizable and famous ship in the galaxy. They stumble into Han and Chewie, they stumble across Luke’s lightsaber, they stumble around randomly, bumping into whatever they need in order to progress the storyline. The entire film is deus ex machina.

The planets are conceptually TINY. Death Star 3 is supposed to be about the same size as Earth, and the characters are constantly near each other. The resistance feels like it is made up of about 20 ships and about 150 people. The winners of the rebellion are STILL just sitting in bunkers, looking at holo-screens, 50 years later. We see a couple planets, we hear nothing about the outside galaxy. It feels like the entire Star Wars universe is abysmally small. I’d be really interested to hear from someone just walking out of the movie who wasn’t very familiar with the setting as to how many planets they think are in the Star Wars galaxy. A couple dozen, maybe? Do you think they would guess anywhere near close to correct, at tens of thousands? How many citizens would that person actually live in the Republic? Would they get anywhere close to the tens of trillions of people that are supposed to be in the Republic alone?

The original trilogy is a bit lacking in this regard as well, but for obvious reasons. The prequels go the opposite way, giving too much setting at the expense of the actual story. This film goes all the way back the other way, giving even less setting that the most barebones parts of the original trilogy.

This is the last big missed opportunity for the film. It could have been about Star Wars as a whole, touching on many planets, seeing a vibrant and war-torn galaxy. Instead it is all about a dusting of people on a thimble-full of planets.

Final Thoughts

I like a lot of things about The Force Awakens. I want to like the movie, but I can’t. The more I think about it, the more I hate it because of how easy it would have been to make a halfway compelling Star Wars movie.

Maybe the upcoming films will be better, that will remain to be seen. I do know for sure that my expectations will be in the toilet. At least this new one isn’t as bad as the prequels, I need to keep telling myself that. Still, the Clone Wars animated series is by far the most well fleshed out part of the Star Wars universe (now that the books are non-canon), and that is a bit pathetic for the likes of JJ, Lucas, and crew.

I shall now retreat into the dank cave with my other Star Wars nerds and look up fan edits, seeking validation.