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| Star Wars review, so, locking S-Foils in attack position... |
I know that the bulk of these posts have been about Star Trek. Sure, I've thrown in some BvS:DoJ, and some D&D, and some photoshop fun. But I wanted to talk about the thing that everyone is talking about and that's Star Wars. Does the internet need another opinion about Star Wars? For the record, no, it does not. However, this review is not really for you. It's for me. I'm writing this because I need to process what I saw. Because it stirred a very complex reaction in me, and I am very conflicted about it.
Star Wars is not a thing that I take lightly. Like many of my generation, it was part of my formation as a human being. The original film blew apart my limited concepts of how the world worked. At the age of five, I was not able to process a good guy dying. It messed with my myopic concept of religion, seeing a world where Christianity didn't even exist, and everybody was surprisingly okay with that.* It began my love affair with the fantastic. Parents aside, I'm trying to remember anything that I loved before Star Wars and I'm not sure that I can. I am simply not capable of being objective when it comes this subject matter.
Such is the nature of love.
The prequels just crushed me. I came to understand that not only did Lucas not really understand or respect the legacy of his own creation, but also that as a fan, I was now entirely irrelevant. The EU frustrated me. I bought terrible books, suffered through awful games, watched horrible films and television, all because it bore the brand. There are gems of course — the Thrawn Trilogy, Tartakovsky's Clone Wars, Knights of the Old Republic — but it was an abusive relationship between Star Wars and this particular fan.
So, when Disney announced Abrams was announced, I was skeptical. I find him an uneven filmmaker. I dropped Lost after the first season. Alias and Fringe were hit or miss for me, though I preferred the latter. I thought Mission Impossible 3 was interesting, Super-8 was a colossal mess. I'm sure I'll get into this in another post down the line, but I have an absolute love-hate with his Trek films. But could he do it? Maybe. One consistent thread about his work is that his films look fantastic, and the action sequences are well done. He at least had a big-budget science fiction franchise reboot in his filmography.
I tried to avoid as much of the media surrounding the film as I could. I never watched the trailers beyond the first teaser. Han and Chewie hit me like a ton of bricks, and the shadow of the Phantom Menace loomed over the franchise. And through social media, a few crumbs leaked in. Starkiller base. Fan theories of Luke Skywalker being the man behind the mask. Han professing that things were true, all of it. I went into The Force Awakens with the intent of having as pure of a moviegoing experience as possible. The truth is, I went into The Force Awakens with my arms crossed and daring JJ Abrams to make me love Star Wars again.
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| Snape kills Dumbledore #starwarsspoilers |
Much like his Star Trek films, Abrams is far more interested in painting with broad strokes than getting into the minutia of the mythology. This is where my if-only-they-had-done-blank fanboy nerdism gets in the way of me being able to let go of the past and embrace the film wholly. Fin should have gotten slaughtered in his lightsaber duel with Kylo Ren. It undercut him as both a villain and the importance of the Force and its wielders in the universe. Rey discovered her powers far too easily. And the parallels between the Artoo's stolen data tapes and BB-8's map to the first Jedi Temple, and the Death Star and Starkiller Base were too much. The last one was my biggest disappointment. It felt both calculated and lazy. It hammered the nail in the coffin of this as a remake of A New Hope. There are many, many other parallels, too many to go into here. Are these just fanboy nits or fundamental flaws in the film? Well, to be honest, they're both, which is why I'm having such a hard time reconciling my feelings about the movie.
The Force Awakens cannot be judged on its own merits. Because if taken on its own merits, it's a fun, if derivative, action movie. However, movies, particularly this one, do not exist in a vacuum. This is not just a sequel in a decades-spanning, multi-gazillion-dollar franchise, but a both a celebration of and an apology for its predecessors. Did I recognize that the Tie fighter chase of the Millennium Falcon was a blatant ripoff of the asteroid chase in Empire? Of course I did. Did I love it anyway? Of course I did. Did I recognize that blowing up Coruscant and other unnamed planets was a metaphorical eradication of prequels? Of course I did.
This isn't a black and white situation. I should be raging against it. I should be fawning over it. It's lazy and terrible, and glorious and wonderful. I should look it as an action-space-fantasy, yet it has a connection to the core of who I am that I cannot just dismiss it as the big-budget, mega-studio blockbuster popcorn fun it is. I wish it were that simple. It's not.
To say that The Force Awakens is a soft-reboot of the franchise, or a remake of A New Hope, dismisses what it has accomplished for me. This film is the emotional equivalent of a grand romantic gesture. And while some have cynically seen this as the calculated ploy it is, it has simply given me hope that I can love Star Wars again.
Star Wars began as a love letter to the cheesy sci-fi serial films of Lucas' youth. And what the Force Awakens is Abrams' love letter to the films of his youth, which happens to be Star Wars. The circle is now complete. The learner has become the master.
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*As a five-year-old, I was not well versed in comparative theology.
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