The year was
1983, and 6 year old me walked out of the theater after Return of The Jedi
amazed, wanting nothing more, with all my body and soul (the way only a 6 year
old boy can) than to see the next film, to see what happened next. They were
going to make a next film, right? Hadn’t Lucas supposedly already mapped out
the next three? My Dad said it could take a while.
32 years
later, I was walking into that film. No pressure, JJ Abrams.
So much had
happened, in my life and in the world, in the interim. Star Wars became the
backdrop, the set piece, for my entire generation of geeks, reinforced by the
Kevin Smith movies and undimmed even by the idiocy of the prequels. At least as you were cringing to Jar Jar, you
knew that eventually, the timeline would catch up to the “Holy Trinity” of legitimately good films.
But now?
Actually, now
was pretty damned awesome. THE FORCE AWAKENS lived up to that 6 year
old’s dream, in a way that the 32 year old man could appreciate as well.
All the actors
could act this time. Strong female lead, and strong black male lead – no
helpless Leias waiting to be rescued (well, except for actual Leia) or Landos
to be comic relief. I suppose it was too much to ask of mainstream Hollywood
for an interracial kiss, but the romantic tension was there.
Tons of fan
service, but hey, they call it fan service because fans like it. JJ threw in an
overabundance of references to the original trilogy, from the set pieces to the
famous lines (I’ve got a bad feeling about this…) to the random aliens and
vehicles that we all knew and loved, and played with the toys of. The bridge of
the super star destroyer? Same set. The rebellion’s planning room? Same set.
Repetition of entire scenes, albeit tilted 45 degrees (Leia telling Han there
was still good in her son, she could sense it, Han’s failed attempt to bring
his son over just as Luke failed to bring his father, Luke’s daughter Rei
calling the Millennium Falcon a “piece of junk” upon seeing it just as her
father did, stormtroopers killing innocent villagers in their search for a
droid).
I suspect some
reviewers will criticize the film for leaning too heavily on so many
recapitulations, but I think they will be missing the point – this is a film
intentionally built on the ruins of its predecessors, a point driven home by
the Ozymandias-like wrecks of the Star Destroyer and AT-AT that Rei climbs
through and scavenges. JJ Abrams is that scavenger, mining what has become epic
source material, doubtless feeling the same burden as Virgil must have when he
took on writing the Aeneid as a sequel to Homer’s earlier epics of the Iliad
and the Odyssey. Aeneas spends an awful lot of time meeting the same monsters
as Odysseus, recounting the same scenes from
the Trojan War as the Iliad…and eventually, eventually does move into
new territory, but is always conscious of, and respectful to an obsessive fault
of, its venerated predecessors.
Which brings
me to what I found most powerful and engaging about The Force Awakens – the
entire plot, every character, is driven by the desperate question, “Will I be
able to be as good as my predecessors, as my parents?” Kylo Ren, both
frightening and emo at the same time, is consumed with doubt about whether he
can live up to the idealized image of his grandfather, Darth Vader. Here we
have a villain who is conscious of the fact that he can not live up to the epic
villain of the earlier movies and hates himself for being constantly “tempted
to the light side”…and his tragedy is that he has idealized Vader, does not
know what we fans know, that Vader himself was a man constantly in conflict
about his feelings for his son.
The First
Order, successors to the Empire, are also trying to overcompensate. They build
the same damned Death Star, only bigger (and chew on this, Alderaan, it
destroys multiple planets at once)…with the same damned vulnerability (well, a
combination of the exhaust port trench thing from A New Hope and the deflector
shield from Return of the Jedi on Endor). They serve a giant-sized version of
the Emperor, who we only realize later in the film is giant sized just because
that’s the hologram they communicate with him through. Once again, an idealized
image to live up to that has clay feet.
And the actual
parental generation? Leia is still going through the motions of commanding the
rebellion (er, resistance), but it’s just a paltry collection of little X-wing
fighters now, and she looks miserable and tired. Han, by far the most
compelling character in the film, is both admirable and pitiable, an aging hero
who has failed in his role as both father and husband, and now lives a mockery
of his youthful days as a smuggler. He’s stuck in his own idealized version of
the past, except it looks worse on him (and Leia, too) because he KNOWS what it
used to be like. His triumph is when he screws up the courage to face the
challenge not only of redeeming his son, but reclaiming (or maybe claiming) his
identity as a father. Han’s last dying act is to tenderly stroke his son’s
face, his son who has even just now murdered him. He becomes, in his final
moments, the father that Vader failed to be for Luke, and which Luke has
(apparently, from what we can glean) failed to be for Rei. Han, who began his
character arc in A New Hope as the look-out-for-number-one guy, whose very name
was “Solo,” literally gives his life over to the relationship with his son.
(Oh, and
the symbolism of the sun slowly dying, the encroaching darkness as Han fails to
keep Kylo from the Dark Side, was very well done.)
Classic hero’s
journey – the old heroes die so the new heroes can have their day. “It’s just
us, now,” says Kylo Ren to Rei after killing his father, and thus sets the
stage for the movies to come.
I cannot help
but think back to what I still feel was, hands down, THE most powerful and
symbolic scene of A New Hope, maybe even of the whole first trilogy: Obi-Wan is
dueling with Darth Vader aboard the Death Star, buying time for Luke and his
friends to escape. When he looks over and sees Luke, Han, and Leia boarding the
Millennium Falcon and getting away, the expression in his face (and the
triumphant yet mournful music that kicks up) says it all – he’s done his work,
the torch has been passed. He then stands still and lets Vader kill him. “If
you strike me down, I’ll become more powerful than you imagine” wasn’t a threat
meant literally…it was a warning to Vader that killing Obi-Wan will just hasten
the coming of the newer, fresher heroes.
Which brings
me to what, hands down, was the most powerful and meaningful scene for me from
The Force Awakens: the very final scene, where Rei, who has already proven
herself to be a capable hero, meets her father, Luke – as much a shadow of his
old self as Han and Leia, if not more – and holds out his lightsaber to him. He
just stares at it. The music crescendos and you see the desperation in Rei’s
face, and he just stands there and won’t pick up the weapon.
Without words,
Rei is making the same plea Luke made of the aging Yoda in Return of the Jedi
(“Master, you can’t die!”), with as little success. She is a child begging her
parents to fix things, to make it all better, and is being told that no, it’s
up to her now. If Obi-Wan’s fateful look at Luke in A New Hope said “the torch
is passed,” Rei’s look here says, “can this cup not be passed from me?”
That
difference, that full circle, speaks volumes to me as the young(ish) adult
inheritor of my parents’ generation – I am the age my father was when he took
me to see the original Star Wars movies, if not a little older. I am sitting in
a theater with a crowd of my young students who I brought here, and soon will
be telling a (sanitized) version of the film to my daughter back home. Writ
even larger, the world my generation has inherited seems more uncertain and
dangerous than the one my parents grew up in, and now it’s on our shoulders to
somehow fix it. That goes double for my students and my own children. If the
original trilogy was somehow political allegory for World War II and the Cold
War, this trilogy looks to be shaping up to be a parallel to our own era. In
the 1980s, we were still a forward-looking society. Now, like the medieval
Europeans who who looked back on the
ancient Romans’ glory and romanticized it (hmm, “Rome” and “Romantic” – are
they related? I’m too lazy to google the etymology), we yearn for earlier days
that we somehow see as simpler and safer. We are Rei, sitting in the ruins of
fallen Star Destroyers, and Kylo, staring into the wreckage of Darth Vader’s
helmet and asking it for help that it cannot possibly give. Yesteryear's Star
Wars movies had totally sanitized violence – even the severed limbs were
bloodless. This movie forces us to look at blood, from the blood that smears
Finn’s helmet to the blood that Kylo keeps slapping away from his wounds during
his final battle with Rei.
Lest this all
get too heavy, the film’s little inserts of self-referential humor were nice
and usually timed well enough to be tension relievers as opposed to
mood-breakers. It was a little irritating that the only Black character fell
into jive-turkey shtick at times, but fortunately those times were rare. I also
just couldn’t wrap my head around the geopolitics (er, galactopolitics?) of
this new galaxy – is the Republic in charge, and the First Order is challenging
it as a kind of rebellion? The big “Nurenberg rally” speech gave that
impression. But the armed wing of the Republic is called “the Resistance,”
which would seem to imply that the First Order dominates the galaxy, and the
Republic is essentially a government in exile, a “Kurdistan” or “Taiwan” that
considers itself independent but is not recognized by the larger power that
looms over it. A few lines of dialogue (maybe they exist in a deleted scene)
could really clear this up. Also, R2D2’s wakeup didn't make any sense…BB-8 had
been there with the plans for quite some time, so why does C3PO think it was
the introduction of the plans that at last woke R2?
But these points of confusion don’t even hold
a lightsaber-candle to the “mitichlorion” nonsense from Phantom Menace, so I am
hardy complaining.
So, well done
JJ – four stars. This was what the Star Wars of 2015 needed to be, and it
served that role splendidly (with a minimum of lens flare, too – I admire your
self control!) I really hope the next two films keep up with this standard, but
for now, I’m just glad the torch has indeed been passed once more.
But would it
have been too much to ask for a scene where we see Jar Jar’s bones hung up in a
hall to dry? Maybe next movie.
Comments
Post a Comment