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The Force Awakens review (spoilers!)

      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.

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