Yeah.... I’m a little bit late. The Force Awakens released on Blu-Ray in April, but I hadn’t seen it since it opened theatrically in December, and yesterday seemed as good a time as any to revisit.
The reason I put off rewatching it for so long was….
Okay, so a little bit of personal history: the high bar for Star Wars, walking into The Force Awakens, was The Empire Strikes Back, which is probably my favourite movie. When The Phantom Menace was still in production, I avoided pretty much everything about it (only to be spoiled by the soundtrack listing - thanks a lot, Qui-Gon’s Noble End), only to be horribly disappointed.
Two days before Attack of the Clones was released, I read the screenplay, which is the clearest demonstration I can come up with for how much The Phantom Menace had damaged my affection for the franchise.
The Force Awakens was going to be different, though - the first new “main series” Star Wars in a decade, with not just a new director, but one who was a self-professed fan. Even watching Abrams’ Star Trek, he seemed like he’d be a better fit for a galaxy far, far away….
But I’d been burned before. So, while I didn’t seek out spoilers, I didn’t shy away from marketing like I had for Episode I. And what I saw seemed impressive - practical sets and effects! Shooting on 70mm! There were things I didn’t like, too (that swooping, upside-down shot of the Falcon pulling a loop still annoys me), but I was cautiously optimistic.
And then I saw it.
Let’s be clear: I didn’t dislike it. There were - and are - bits of The Force Awakens that I love. That’s mostly the characters; Rey, Finn, Poe, BB-8, and Kylo Ren are all great, and the movie does, for the most part, look pretty great, too.
Ultimately, a lot of the problems I have with The Force Awakens are little things (and one big one). The little things, in no particular order:
- A lot of the gags don’t work; mostly the ones involving Finn, but especially the “chin nod” gag and “I’M IN CHARGE NOW, PHASMA!!!!”, which seem out of place A) in Star Wars, and B) for Finn’s character.
- It’s been said elsewhere, but Phasma is criminally underused. I think that’s part of what makes Finn getting up in her face not work - if she’d been seen lording it over the other troopers, giving them (or Finn specifically) a hard time, then it might have worked - but she’s just stern and businesslike, so the “IN YOUR FACE” moment isn’t earned.
- Finn’s whole arc, in fact, is too rushed, and I don’t quite buy the incident that gives him his crisis of faith. Seeing a friend die is powerful, sure, but if anything I’d expect it to harden his resolve, not break it. Wouldn’t it have been more effective to have him back off from killing some cowering villagers, or something else that finally drove home the notion that the First Order is evil?
- Where are all the rodians and twi’leks? I get that it’s a big galaxy, and there’s a lot of stuff there, but throwing a couple of original trilogy aliens in the background of Maz Kanata’s cantina wouldn’t have gone amiss.
- The whole Rathtar sequence is garbage, and clearly exists just for an EXCITING ACTION SCENE. It reminds me of the equally-pointless EXCITING ACTION SCENE in Abrams’ first Star Trek, where Kirk is chased across the ice planet by monsters for precisely no reason.
- C-3PO serves no purpose in this film beyond fanservice. His first appearance (“Hello! You probably don’t recognise me because of my red arm”, etc.) is a flat joke, and serves no narrative function. Sure, have him in the Resistance base - at least there he’s doing stuff beyond getting in Leia’s way for a cheap (failed) gag.
- Speaking of Leia, what happened to her her accent? Carrie Fisher had a kind of mid-atlantic thing going on in the original trilogy, but she’s just got her own accent this time around. Not a big deal, just jarring.
- Oh, and that final, wobbling helicopter shot of Luke and Rey is awful.
On the narrative side, there are too many things that seem set up to be explained later, rather than letting the film exist as a (potentially) stand-alone story. The biggest of these is why, exactly, Kylo Ren wants to be on the dark side so badly. Darth Vader, when he first appeared, was simply a servant of the Emperor, and all the other stuff came later. When you’re introducing a character as the conflicted son who’s fallen to the dark side, I feel like you have to do something to suggest why. He hasn’t been corrupted or seduced by the dark side - quite the opposite, in fact, as he has to struggle quite hard to resist the pull of the light.
But that’s not the big deal. There’s a bigger deal.
A planet-sized deal.
Let’s talk about Starkiller.
The Starkiller base is the worst idea in the entire film. It’s a hollow attempt to raise the stakes, and it just doesn’t work. Yes, they use it to blow up five planets at once, but they’re planets we’ve never heard of or seen, so there’s no investment.
How the hell did the thing even get built? Does the First Order somehow have even greater resources than the Empire did, at the height of its power? How would that happen?
Why does it eat suns?
I’m strongly of the opinion that they should have cut Starkiller entirely, and made the whole movie about the race to find Luke. It would have been a neater, tighter, more focused story, and could have kept a real sense of pace the whole way through.
So no, when all is said and done, The Force Awakens didn’t give me a new high bar for Star Wars.
But at least it didn’t set a new low.
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