Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015)

This will begin to make things right. — Lor San Tekka

The first spoken lines of Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens suggest that all is not right in a galaxy far, far away. Within the diegetic timeline of the films, the last time we saw the heroes of the Star Wars universe they were celebrating their victory over the Empire on Endor and dancing with the Ewoks. But as the opening crawl of The Force Awakens tells us, “Luke Skywalker has vanished,” and a new, but familiar looking enemy has risen from the ashes of the Empire: the First Order. The victory against the Emperor was apparently a short-lived one. We are once again plunged into an epic battle of good versus evil, the only one that really matters, as a new character, Maz Kanata (Lupita Nyong’o), tells us: “The Sith. The Empire. Today, it is the First Order.” The names change. The story remains the same.

Of course, undoing the happy ending of Return of the Jedi was inevitable when in 2012 it was announced that George Lucas was selling Lucasfilm, and the Star Wars saga, to the Walt Disney Company for $4.05 billion dollars. Disney soon after declared their plans to produce new Star Wars films—a sequel trilogy to Lucas’s Original and Prequel trilogies, as well as spin-off films. At that moment, the Star Wars saga, a set of six films that grew out of the original 1977 film and telling the story of the Skywalker family, the rise of the Empire, and the Galactic Civil War, ceased to be a contained saga and became a series, ostensibly—regardless of the advertising for this year’s The Rise of Skywalker insisting the contrary—perpetually ongoing.

Not that Lucas wasn’t intent on making as much money from Star Wars as he could, but after Revenge of the Sith he had made it clear that he was done with the series and as far as he was concerned it was complete. Along with the rights to Star Wars and other Lucasfilm properties, Lucas had provided Disney with a set of outlines for a potential sequel trilogy following after Return of the Jedi, but, by all accounts, Disney opted to ignore most of them, hiring producer Kathleen Kennedy to oversee the development of new Star Wars films. Kennedy in turn hired director J.J. Abrams, who had previously attempted to inject Star Wars-like energy into the rebooted Star Trek franchise to great success.

To return to the lines spoken by Lor San Tekka (Max Von Sydow) near the start of The Force Awakens, what needs to be made right? Some have interpreted the line as a shot at Lucas’s own much-maligned Prequel Trilogy, suggesting that the new Disney films would right the Star Wars series by returning to all of the things that fans, and the movie-going public at large, desired from the Star Wars films: the aforementioned simple tale of good versus evil, filled with memorable creatures and characters, good-natured humour, and exciting action. In particular, the Disney films would bring back to the screen the much loved heroes of the original trilogy: Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, and Han Solo, all played by the original actors, Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, and, despite nearly three decades of avoiding Star Wars fandom, Harrison Ford. 

The Force Awakens was faced with the daunting task of recapturing everything the public at large loved about the original Star Wars nearly 40 years earlier, and the greatest compliment I can pay the film is this: it does a pretty great job of doing so! The film conveys not only the generic thrills and visual splendour of a Star Wars film, but it reaches for and often achieves the emotional resonance as well. The dominant emotional frameworks of The Force Awakens are ones of excitement and nostalgia. And that sense of excitement is never entirely divorced from the nostalgic impulse. It’s a film about experiencing things again, in particular, the wish to recapture something long loved and to re-experience it as if it’s new all over again; it’s the excitement of a fan, and it’s contagious. Watching the film, especially as a Star Wars fan, it’s difficult for me not to get caught up in the film and its energy and emotions. This excitement is shared by the new protagonists of the film. As Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac) remarks upon stealing a TIE Fighter to escape from the First Order, “I’ve always wanted to fly one of these.” The excitement of getting something—freedom, an experience of adventure, a sense of moral purpose—drives each of the new protagonists of the film.

But nostalgia, that feeling of looking back on the past with an intense sense of longing, while it generates the most intense emotions is ultimately an illusory and impossible dream. In our roundtable discussion of the film nearly 4 years ago, I first identified this fact “that the driving emotion of The Force Awakens is nostalgia, both in the film and in the audience. Characters repeat the events of the original films in the same mythic breath that fans do. It’s about return, repetition. The driving emotion of [A New Hope] was wonder, a call to adventure, to a new cinematic world that no one had ever seen before even if it did recall many classic films.” I followed that observation up with one of my major reservations about The Force Awakens, which could be summed up that “in making Star Wars Lucas drew on world mythology, science fiction serials, Kurosawa, David Lean, and more; in making The Force Awakens J.J. Abrams drew on Lucas.” By centering so strongly on nostalgia, The Force Awakens is ultimately narrowed in the range and possibility of experience that it tackles.

The Force Awakens treats the events of the Star Wars films, especially the Original Trilogy, as the ruins upon which the story is built. These ruins of the past are the setting and subject matter of the film. The ruins are both the literal relics and wreckage of the past films: the epic desert junkyard of Jakku—according to paratexts, the location of the final battle that marked the defeat of the Empire a year after Endor—complete with crashed Star Destroyers and AT-AT walkers; and the rediscovery of Anakin’s lightsaber that Luke lost years earlier on Cloud City in The Empire Strikes Back. But also the damaged relationships and lost stories The Force Awakens reveals: Han and Leia’s estranged relationship after the loss of their son to the Dark Side; Luke’s disappearance after his perceived failure with Ben Solo; or the concept that the stories of the Jedi and the Galactic Civil War have passed into legend and myth in the interim since Return of the Jedi. While 30 years is an admittedly short time for such a thing, it more accurately reflects the way the Star Wars films have entered popular consciousness that than something that would realistically happen in the universe. 

The plot of The Force Awakens follows the basic beats of A New Hope. The film never wants to stray too far from the structure of what was tried and true. While I noted that The Phantom Menace also follows the basic narrative of the Kurosawa film, The Hidden Fortress—rescuing a princess, a mission across enemy lines, etc.—the parallels between The Force Awakens and A New Hope are more straightforward and hard to miss: a droid must carry a piece of information vital to the survival of its respective movement across a desert planet, meeting a young, talented orphan along the way; making their way off planet aboard the Millennium Falcon, the orphan and their companions, including a veteran of past wars, must launch a raid on a massive superweapon, whereupon the veteran hero loses their life to a figure from their past.

When laid out in this way, The Force Awakens may seem shameless in its indebtedness to A New Hope. If this were all it offered, The Force Awakens would have a very limited appeal, neither would it function as the launchpad for the Disney Star Wars films, creating the open-ended story that is needed to continue the series.

J.J. Abrams has a tried and tested method for developing viewer interest in his various cinematic and televisual narratives. This method is called the “mystery box.” In Abrams’ conception, outlined many years ago in a 2007 TED Talk he gave in which he presciently used the original Star Wars as an example of a “mystery box” narrative (not that he’s entirely accurate in hs appraisal), stories can be conceived of as mysterious boxes that contain information, and each piece of information in a mystery box story serves to raise new questions that the story can then develop and answer, in turn providing more mysteries. As Abrams explains:

In terms of the content of it, you look at stories, you think, what are stories but mystery boxes? There's a fundamental question—in TV, the first act is called the teaser. It's literally the teaser. It's the big question. So you're drawn into it. Then there's another question. And it goes on. Look at Star Wars. The droids meet the mysterious woman. Who's that? We don't know. Mystery box! Then you meet Luke Skywalker. He gets the droid, you see the holographic image. You learn it's a message. She wants to find Obi-Wan Kenobi. He's her only hope. But who's Obi-Wan Kenobi? Mystery box! So then he meets Ben Kenobi. Ben Kenobi is Obi-Wan Kenobi.

The Force Awakens successfully gets us asking these sorts of questions as a means to bridge the divide between Lucas’s and Disney’s films. From the first lines of the opening crawl the film poses a central mystery around the disappearance of Luke Skywalker, doling out information about what has happened in the intervening 30 years since Return of the Jedi. Mystery is a driving force behind the identity of Rey as well: Who is she? Why can she use the Force so well? In fact, the film literally places these questions into the dialogue of characters at times. When Han Solo brings Rey to Maz Kanata’s castle watering-hole, Maz asks Han, “Who’s the girl?” Of course, the film immediately cuts to another scene, leaving Maz’s question unanswered, but framing it as important to the film. 

Unfortunately, one often gets the sense that Abrams is more interested in raising questions than having satisfying answers to them. There is no greater example of this in the film than Supreme Leader Snoke (played via motion capture by Andy Serkis). Snoke is revealed to be the actual leader of the First Order, with Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) acting as his apprentice in a replication of the Palpatine-Vader dynamic. It’s familiar in its aping of the Sith from the Original Trilogy, but it's never revealed how Snoke rose to power or why he can use the Force. Is he a manifestation of the Dark Side, a lost Sith Lord (perhaps the mysterious Darth Plagueis), or something else? The books and extra-filmic material hint at Snoke’s origin beyond the Outer Rim, but his subsequent fate in The Last Jedi suggests that Abrams, Rian Johnson, and company never had a firm answer. As it is, Snoke is utterly useless, unnecessary to staging Kylo Ren’s fall to the Dark Side, and present purely to repeat the familiar beats and rhythms of the Original Trilogy.

Additionally, the impulse to introduce new mysteries is often at odds with the film’s function of reintroducing and revisiting elements of the past films, even as the two functions are intertwined. This can lead to a feeling of strained coincidence, even for a series of films known for what has been called “shrinking universe syndrome.” For instance, soon after Maz’s line asking about the girl, Rey finds herself in the basement of Maz’s castle and discover’s Anakin’s lightsaber in a chest. The lightsaber seems to call to Rey, presenting her with visions of the past, both events the lightsaber participated in and Rey’s own traumas of abandonment. It’s a stunning scene, using the temporal structures of flashback and premonition that cinema utilizes so well. But it’s never explained why Maz has the lightsaber that supposedly fell down the central shaft of Cloud City with Luke’s severed hand. And when asked about it, Maz waves it off for another time. Is this controlled or lazy storytelling?  

The lightsaber is only the tip of the iceberg that includes the presence of the Millenium Falcon on Jakku, Han and Chewie running into Finn and Rey as they escape, and even the very existence of a map to the whereabouts of a person who disappeared. Who made the map? Why does Lor San Tekka have it? One gets the sense that these questions were never really thought out, only in terms of the propulsive power they lend the plot. I’m hardly a stickler for “plausibility” in cinema, and I believe that, ultimately, emotional and thematic resonance weighs greater in my evaluations, but there are moments in The Force Awakens that strain that believability.

Another way that The Force Awakens updates and makes Star Wars new is in its cinematography and action. The film is simply gorgeous looking. Abrams manages to capture several images of stunning beauty and the visual effects work is second to none. In fact, The Force Awakens at times makes other contemporary blockbusters look drab by comparison (that it didn’t win the Academy Award for Best Achievement in Visual Effects is a testament to how highly esteemed the work in Mad Max: Fury Road was that same year). The film keeps the tradition of Star Wars films having exceptional visual effects, and if it isn’t quite boundary pushing the way earlier entries were, it refines and very nearly perfects many of the techniques of digital visual effects developed by ILM over the past two decades.

At the same time, The Force Awakens tries to maintain some visual continuity with the past Star Wars films. Like Lucas, Abrams here uses a lot of medium shots alternating with medium close-ups for dialogue scenes. But there is no mistaking Abrams’ film for the old movies. Abrams brings much more frequent and fluid camera movement into the mix as opposed to Lucas’s reliance onstatic set-ups. The camera is often tracking alongside characters who are moving horizontally with the camera, or in other instances, the camera tracks backward as characters propel forward towards the viewer. This fits with Abrams’ sense of narrative propulsiveness, giving the film a sense of formal unity. Abrams also has a tendency to cut on action (as is common in contemporary editing), and even uses a sound bridge in several instances, having dialogue or sound effects continue over or begin across previous scenes, devices Lucas never uses in the Original or Prequel Trilogies, with their rigid application of wipes between scenes (though Abrams still throws in a few wipes to please this fan).

Abrams once again manages to combine the film’s best and worst impulses in a single instance in one of the film’s most striking images. In the scene, Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) stares out the window of his Star Destroyer at the beam emanating from the system-destroying weapon, Starkiller Base. The red beam cutting across Ren’s silhouette as John Williams’ score swells brings the emotion of the moment to vivid realization. Of course, this same sequence defies logic as characters in multiple systems across vast reaches of space are able to view the same beam as it strikes at the New Republic capital on Hosnia Prime. It’s a visual conceit Abrams used in his Star Trek reboot as well (having characters able to view the destruction of Vulcan from another planet), and while one can understand what he’s going for, it strains the spatial sensibility that Star Wars, which draws on the clarity of classical Hollywood style, has generally maintained.

Abrams goes for an overly literal sense of the poetic in many cases. For instance, take the conception of the First Order as the heirs of the Empire. While the parallels between the Empire and the Nazis was pretty clear in the Original Trilogy, Abrams pushes the parallel further to cement the First Order as pure evil. Take, for instance, General Hux (Domnhall Gleason), addressing his troops in a recreation of a Third Reich rally, complete with stormtroopers giving a terrifying salute after Hux practically spits his rage and madness upon them. It’s an instance where, despite the supposed sophistication and complexity of the new Disney films, the aforementioned desire to distill Star Wars into a simplified good versus evil tale results in something bordering on cartoonish.

In spite of its less sophisticated treatment of the lines between good and evil,  the film does craft several complex new characters, particularly Kylo Ren. Ren, formally Ben Solo, is Han and Leia’s corrupted son, who has turned to the Dark Side of the Force and remains fixated on his grandfather, Anakin Skywalker’s dark alter ego, Darth Vader. The concept that one of Han and Leia’s children would turn to the Dark Side was explored in some of the, now expunged from canon, Expanded Universe novels; in Legacy of the Force: Sacrifice, Jacen Solo, Han and Leia’s eldest son, becomes Darth Caedus. In having Kylo Ren as the next generation of Skywalker in the Disney Trilogy, it means that Ren plays more as a dark and damaged protagonist than a true antagonist, a fact that is further developed in The Last Jedi. 

Thankfully, Adam Driver is up to the task of playing the character who bridges the two sets of films through his parentage. He manages to imbue Ren with a sense of immaturity and impulsiveness that draws on both of Hayden Christensen’s performance as Anakin in the prequels. He also manages to sell the new emotional conflicts, which come to play in the film’s most memorable sequence, when he faces down his father, Han Solo.

Ford and Driver bring a sense of emotional rawness to the scene that is almost out of place in a big blockbuster like this. And it’s not all rooted in our fondness for Han Solo, as Solo here exudes a tenderness and sadness that we haven’t really seen from him in the other films. When he calls out to his son, “Ben!”, and Kylo Ren responds, we get the sense that there is still a conflict within Kylo. Their confrontation on the bridge over the chasm of Starkiller Base is the emotional heart of the film. Driver’s weepy eyes manage to make us believe it when he says he’s not sure if he can go through with what he knows he needs to do. Visually, the scene echoes The Empire Strikes Back and the dark reversal of Luke and Vader’s confrontation (again demonstrating the mirror-like quality of the film). As well, the scene visually underscores Ben’s embrace of darkness as the light of the system’s sun is drained by Starkiller Base, and the shaft of light illuminating the characters on the bridge disappears as Ben ignites his lightsaber into his father’s chest, killing Han Solo and seemingly setting him up as making his decision for the Dark Side.  

This sets up the final battle in the snowy forest between Ren, Rey, and Finn. It’s a rousing visual sight, with Kylo Ren’s crossguard lightsaber especially striking against the snowy dark blue of the forest. It seems sets up the conflict between these three characters as key to the new series.

It’s to the film’s great credit that it has us care this much about these new characters. Not only Kylo Ren, but Rey and Finn as well. Daisy Ridley and John Boyega both bring a verve and spark to their characters, making us believe that they are as dazzled by the adventure as the viewer is. Ridley has a very difficult role as Rey, set up as the primary character through whom the viewer experiences the various events of the film, much like Luke Skywalker in A New Hope. Even her name, Rey, brings to mind a “Ray of Hope.” A New Hope. Ridley manages to convey a lot through her performance, since Rey is, by design, a mysterious character without a lot of details revealed about her. She performs well in the largely silent scenes on Jakku which establish her lonely character.

Boyega’s Finn is also very good, offering us a hint of Han Solo’s character turn from A New Hope, as his initial turn from the First Order first involves running away from danger before embracing heroism. Poe Dameron, played by Oscar Isaac, is dashing and impulsive, a fast talking thorn in the side of the villains and a fan favourite. It’s interesting to think how the new “trinity” of characters the film establishes scrambles elements of the original three. Here, Rey follows Luke’s path, Finn, Han Solo’s, and Poe, as the one connected to the Resistance and General Leia Organa’s best pilot, extends from her character.

As far as the old trinity of heroes goes, perhaps the biggest disappointment of The Force Awakens is that we never see all of them together again. Han Solo is given the most to do, acting as the one who initiates the younger generation into the battle of good and evil. Leia is now General Organa rather than Princess (though as Lor San Tekka says, “She’ll always be royalty to me”). Entering the film in the second half, Leis is now a wise and battle weary leader. Luke is saved for the final scene, and says nothing as the film ends on Rey extending her outstretched hand with his old lightsaber to him on the cliffs of Ach To. It’s a true cliffhanger, ending right before either character speaks.

The end of the film returns us to the question of nostalgia as we realize it is now impossible to recapture the past. We are denied fulfillment in a reuniting of our beloved heroes in exchange for a continuation of the larger story. One can read the acknowledgement of this impossible dream and rejection of nostalgia in a positive sense, a letting go, as certain readings of The Last Jedi’s more radical rejection of the past do. But after more than two hours of having our affection for these films mined and recreated as much as possible, it comes across as more than a little bit false. As noted back in our roundtable four years ago, nostalgia isn’t just a longing for the past. It’s painful. As Don Draper noted on Mad Men, the word ‘nostalgia” literally means the pain from an old wound in the ancient Greek. So, our desire to relive Star Wars inevitably comes with pain.

Perhaps, then, identifying nostalgia so prominently as the emotional framework for the film is fully appropriate and in keeping with the film’s denial of satisfaction. However, returning to the line I began this piece with, one gets the sense that it is in fact the opposite. The Force Awakens, as good as it is, as satisfying as its highs are despite its shortcomings, isn’t about setting things right. Returning to the galaxy far, far away here means undoing the happy ending. It’s about reopening those old wounds for the chance to feel it all again one more time.

9 out of 10

Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens (USA, 2015)

Directed by J.J. Abrams; written by Lawrence Kasdan & J.J. Abrams and Michael Arndt, based on characters created by George Lucas; starring Harrison Ford, Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, Adam Driver, Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, Oscar Isaac, Lupita Nyong’o, Max Von Sydow, Domnhall Gleason, Anthony Daniels, Peter Mayhew, Gwendoline Christie, Andy Serkis.