I was six (almost seven) when it came out, and Mom and I went to see it with our neighbors, a boy my age (who was my best buddy at the time) and his mom. It was showing in the next town over, and by the time we got there, the line was stretched around the block twice. Apparently, fire regulations weren't quite as stringent in 1977, because we all got into the single theater, though we little kids had to sit up front on the theater floor. When it started up, the screen took up even beyond what my peripheral vision could catch. It was the entire world, and it was beautiful. My buddy and I spent the ride back quoting lines to each other ("Someone get this big walking carpet out of my way!"), and it became a major, major event right up until RotJ in 1983. My later best friends and I formed a club, and wrote our very own Mary Sue fanfics for it. (Yes, they predated the internet, and it was astoundingly horrible, and I loved it and still do.)
I don't know if it's possible now to explain it, in a time when blockbusters come and go "like busboys in a restaurant" (as another of our cult movies put it). By the time part three of a series comes around, people are barely talking about it anymore, and there's only a year between them. The attention span was considerably longer in 1977. Star Wars, well... it was what gave us our first generational identity. It bound us, penetrated us, and bound the generation together, so to speak. We were still buying toys from the first movie when the second one came out three years later. When my college ran the trilogy -- all of us within a couple of years of one another in age -- the lecture hall they showed it in was packed to the rafters, with people sitting on the stairs and standing up against the walls. For hours. Quoting along with favorite lines, cheering at the good guys, hissing at the bad guys, and, possibly the only time in my undergraduate experience, with no rancor between factions at all. (Yes, yes, there was the Rancor in RotJ, but that's a different thing.) (ETA: I have been corrected. Apparently, a left/right fistfight almost broke out over the "Wars not make one great" line. I must have missed that in my own bliss-out.) I'm sure people later went on and on about how that awful blockbuster thing was reactive or some such nonsense, because that's what people do, but in the room, it was all love.
Then, in 1999, the prequels came out. There were people who didn't like them, but I wasn't one of them. I adored TPM and AotC. (I thought RotS dropped the ball on the thematic and narrative arc in a major way, for no discernible purpose, but this review isn't that review.)
And now, the third trilogy is here. I wasn't excited. I'm maybe still not excited, but largely because I was satisfied with the ending of Return of the Jedi. It was a fisher king thing, and I was happy that when Anakin was restored to himself, the galaxy was restored, because in a mythical sense, he was the galaxy. (And yes, I did understand that at twelve, not later on, though I didn't have the frame of reference for it.)
I saw The Force Awakens today. I wasn't so unexcited that I didn't make sure to get tickets the first week, after all. I review with spoilers, so, um... here's a picture and some graphics to take up space if you want to stop reading now.
Here I am dancing with one of my SW buddies, dressed up as our Mary Sues.
Okay, still here?
I will assume that (a) you have seen The Force Awakens or, (b) like me, you rather enjoy spoilers, and think that any movie worth seeing is worth seeing even if you know what happens in it. They will be thick from this point out, so this is the last chance to hit the back button.
First the verdict: Eh. Not bad. Not bad at all. In fact, I had fun. I just wasn't all that engaged in the experience.
Plot
The Empire wasn't utterly destroyed at the end of RotJ, and now survives in the smaller, resurgent First Order, which seeks to crush the Resistance, supported by the Republic. Luke lost an apprentice, who killed everyone, so he went into hiding, and now people are trying to find him. The apprentice in question was Han and Leia's son, and, as might be imagined, that didn't do great things for their relationship, and they now operating mostly as separate entities. A map to Luke's location surfaces, and is hidden in a droid, and a new power trio assembles to protect it, get it to the resistance, and, ultimately, use it. The fallen apprentice, Ben Solo (aka, Kylo Ren) also wants it, so he can track Luke down and destroy the Jedi once and for all. Also, they've turned an entire planet into a Death Star that can destroy entire planetary systems, because one planet at a time is just passe now, apparently. I'm a going to go ahead and put an extra level of spoiler here, just in case you don't want to know about a character death:
When Han confronts Ben, Ben -- who is genuinely conflicted -- uses his inner conflict to get close to Han, and promptly kills him with a lightsaber, then throws him down one of the 'verse's trademark bottomless chasms.
I still think the story was over with the restoration of Anakin's soul at the end of RotJ -- that was kind of the whole point of Luke's choices there, and I am and have always been a Luke girl. I was fond of Leia as a tough girl and okay with Han, but I always felt that time away from Luke was just time wasted. ;p So I have always been fine with his moral choice to heal his father bringing about the redemption of the galaxy by, essentially, magical means.
That wouldn't have left a story for them to tell, my old Mary Sue aside. She was fun, but didn't have a good enough story to carry a franchise. (We were fourteen; the Sues barely had enough story to carry a good cosplay.) So they went in the more realistic direction that the Empire was dealt a serious blow, but didn't just fold up. I can't fault them for that, and they did a better job than the EU novels I've read. For what they chose to go with as a premise, they did a good job with the plotting. I don't think they developed the relationships between old and new characters particularly well, and didn't buy the new character's exaggerated mourning for an old character they'd only just met, but that's a quibble.
I do wish that, instead of being "the resistance," they'd positioned the Republic as the power at this point, with the First Order (the new Sith, basically) and the Imperial remnants as a nasty underground force, if for no other reason than turning the tables. But they didn't. I'll make judgments based on how well they did what they decided to do, rather than carping about what I wish they'd decided to do. That's a kind of pointless critique.
Characters
Han Solo is the main old trilogy character seen here. Harrison Ford slips him on like a comfy pair of bedroom slippers, and I can believe this is a Han who's gone through thirty-two years and a couple of major losses, though the script doesn't establish them too well. (I think in its fear of telegraphing anything, it sacrificed emotional urgency.)
Chewie is, as always, at Han's side, and has a good sense of humor. Han uses his crossbow a couple of times, and it's a running gag that he's just figuring out that it's a powerful weapon.
Leia also appears as the leader of the resistance, and doesn't have much else to do, even though her son is the bad guy. Again, they lose some urgency on this front.
Luke appears at the end, and we don't know much at all, except that he's apparently spent an inordinate amount of time building stone stairs.
New characters, in order of appearance:
Po Dameron is a hotshot pilot who will undoubtedly have more of a role in the future, but who really isn't in this one all that much. He sets things in motion playing Leia's role of hiding information in a droid, in this case, a ball droid called BB-8. (Not sure how that's going to shorten. The Beeb is a thing, and so is the Biebs. I guess he'll just be Beebee?) The place he gets it from, on the planet of Jakku, is destroyed by stormtroopers, at which point we meet...
Finn, a boy taken from his family and raised under mental conditioning to be a stormtrooper, who nevertheless fights that conditioning and doesn't participate in the massacre. He is particularly noticed by Kylo Ren, who presumably senses the Force in him. He helps Po escape from captivity in stole TIE fighter, and they crash together on the planet, but get separated. Finn is one of the more interesting characters. He lies easily and humorously, but knows how to take responsibility. He's a tough fighter, and unlike Han in the first trilogy, doesn't dither about whether or not he wants to be good. He makes the call and acts according to his call for the remainder of the story, showing that he has the kind of strong will that the series values.
Kylo Ren/Ben Solo is a little bit over-the-top, and I'm not at all sure what his deal is. He's been seduced by the Dark Side, yes, and admits throughout that he feels the pull of the Light Side. He just doesn't have the emotional or symbolic weight to pull off the Anakin role, though. If he's rescued, even I couldn't find a way for it to symbolically repair the galaxy, though of course, it would make Leia happy, and that's good in itself. (Well, every soul saved from the Dark Side is a good thing, if only because it's one less source of power for the Dark Side.) Because we never knew him, it's a little hard to care about his conflict. You can't just say, "This is Han and Leia's son" and expect the audience to go, "Awwww." I want to know why he idolizes his grandfather's evil alter-ego, despite the fact that he should have had the whole story told to him all along. What the heck's wrong with Luke and Leia that they let it get that far? (And why in the GFFA would they keep the melted mask?)
The last major new character introduce is Rey, a scavenger girl on the planet of Jakku who, in Skywalker tradition, finds the droid and helps it get to the resistance. She was abandoned there by unnamed parents and has been counting days until their return, but accepts it very quickly when told by bartender Maz that she knows they're not really coming back. Here, Daisy Ridley is obviously going to carry the franchise, and she's good at it. I like her. I like Rey. I don't like the way they're playing the card of her identity as some kind of Sooper Sekrit thing that will be a big bombshell the way, "No, I am your father" was. You can't re-do that. It won't work. And if her father is Luke, what's the response? Yay? (Or, in my case if that turns out true, :eyeroll:). If she's Ben's twin and therefore Leia's daughter, then you get to, "And Han and Leia don't mention having lost a daughter as well... why?" If she's some descendant of Kenobi's, oh, yes. Good going, oh you paragon of faithfulness to the Order.
Look, she's obviously some connection to the family. That's how SW works. The Skywalker family is the GFFA. More to the point, they went to the trouble of scouring for an unknown actress who could easily play Natalie Portman's younger sister... or her actual double. Unless they're going to go with her being related to Sabe the decoy queen (Keira Knightley's character), then somewhere, she's connected to the Skywalkers. Maybe at some point, someone stole cells from poor Padme's body and they were sitting in a cloning vat for years, then someone decided to reactivate them. I don't know. But the virtual capering around going, "I've got a secret and you do-on't know it!" is deeply annoying. All it will do is cause fan wars so that large segments of the fandom will stalk off in a huff if their pet theories are wrong.
Kind of a quibble, though. It goes with my general theory of spoilers -- if knowing them actually spoils your enjoyment of a movie, then there's not much to the movie other than cheap surprise -- but it's not relevant to her as a character. As a character, I really like Rey a lot, and I loved that she got a seriously kick-ass lightsaber duel scene. I like that her interactions with Finn didn't try to mimic the bickering dynamic of Han and Leia. Actually I kind of love that -- they're both really excited about what they can do, and they hit it off right away. We don't see that often enough. I like that she seems to be the apex of the new trio without it being in any manner a romantic competition. And I like that she forgets that she needs to turn the blaster on before she can fire it. And that she looks at a droid and treats it as an individual. I could get into a Rey-based series, for the same reason that I'm a Luke girl: She's a hero whose choices I can buy as making all the difference.
Last and least, the new Big Bad, Snokes. Yes, the Big Bad is basically Darth Snookums. He appears as a giant hologram, and I kept thinking that Toto was going to show up and pull a curtain, revealing a funny little man in a green suit. This aspect needs serious work.
Setting:
Hmm. The setting wanders a bit, and I don't get nearly the sense of Jakku that I had of Tatooine. I can't for the life of me remember the names of the other systems. On the other hand, CGI has allowed them to create much more alien architecture and more varied landscapes, so it already seems more physically complete. But it needs some world-building in the future.
They've added some land-side aerial battles -- it's not all up in space. It gives some nice image work.
Style:
Abrams has done a good job re-creating the SW used-future style. Everything looks good; everything looks like it's in the same universe, except a few decades later. Narratively, this isn't quite on the ball, because it doesn't take the time to develop the simple themes first. (It's back to that emotional urgency question. This might have been a better second story.)
Theme:
I'm not sure, yet. Oh, the usual SW theme of choosing the light, no matter how tempting the darkness might be, but specific to this one... I just don't think we have enough information to guess on.
So, I'm going with "Not bad."
But for the record, I sat as far up front as I could. So far up that I couldn't see the edges of the screen with peripheral vision. For two hours, it was the whole world.
And yes... flaws or no, it was still beautiful.
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