“Star Wars: Episode VII — The Force Awakens,” the first big-screen building block in Disney’s takeover of the empire formerly owned by George Lucas, is frustrating on many levels: It copies the plot of “Episode IV — A New Hope” without adding any new perspectives, it gives no sense of the scope of the events, and it regularly taunts us with the fact that a much more interesting story happened between Episodes VI and VII. Overall, I wasn’t so much thrilled by the return of “Star Wars” to the big screen as I was saddened by how Disney only seems to care about the shallowest aspects of the saga. (SPOILERS follow throughout this review.)
You already know the plot: Heroes come together from all walks of life and team up with a resistance to blow up a superweapon; throw in a rescue mission (or two) and top off with a lightsaber duel (or two). “The Force Awakens” is ostensibly written by J.J. Abrams (who also directs) and Lawrence Kasdan; Michael Arndt is also credited, but his work was scrapped early in the game, as were Lucas’ story treatments. But the screenplay could’ve just as easily been programmed by a computer. Some of the “Episode IV” parallels are blunt: Rey (Daisy Ridley) is now on Luke’s (Mark Hamill) hero’s journey, and both characters are poor children of desert planets. Luke, meanwhile, is being set up take over Yoda’s role in “Episode VIII.” Since we last saw Luke, he experienced the tragic overthrow of his budding Jedi order and became a hermit, much like Yoda.
Some of the trade-outs are more offbeat. Han (Harrison Ford, still looking good, but occasionally limping from his on-set ankle injury) takes over some of Obi-Wan’s beats. Han tells Rey the legends of Luke Skywalker and the Jedi are “true, all of it,” much as Obi-Wan teases Luke about Anakin’s exploits in the Clone Wars.
Although it’s not made clear in the film, “The Force Awakens” seems to take place not on a galactic scale, but rather in one corner of the galaxy. The bad guys are The First Order, a spinoff of the Empire that’s somewhat of a parallel to ISIS. It seems to recruit or kidnap youths into its ranks. (I’m sorry to repeat “seems to” so much in this review, but this film is sketchily defined.) The good guys are the Resistance, which is backed by the New Republic, which was presumably formed in the wake of the Rebels’ victory in “Return of the Jedi.” The Resistance seems to be a stand-in for the forces who are fighting ISIS, with the New Republic as the off-screen stand-in for the United States or possibly NATO.
None of the planets from the first six episodes returns. Jakku is the new home planet; it looks like Tatooine, and it was also the site of a major battle between Episodes VI and VII; Rey earns a meager living by scavenging the wreck of a Star Destroyer. We also see crashed TIE fighters and X-wings. Presumably this battle pitted The First Order against the Resistance. Another major setting is the evocatively snowy forest planet that houses the First Order’s Starkiller Base (a name not mentioned in the film, but it’s prominent in reference materials). The base is an uber Death Star superlaser built into a planet; instead of blowing up one planet, it can split into various beams and take out a handful of planets at once (which it does, although there’s no reason for a viewer to care about these planets).
Joining Rey – who is obviously Luke’s long-lost daughter, although it’s never explicitly stated — among the new cast of heroes are Finn (John Boyega), a stormtrooper (or possibly janitor) who deserts the First Order after being ordered to slaughter civilians on Jakku; Resistance X-wing pilot Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac); and Poe’s astromech droid BB-8, who becomes a pet/friend to all three good guys. With the way his head bobs and rolls around his round body as he assists our heroes in the tradition of R2-D2, BB-8 is the film’s breakthrough star (with Rey a close second).
While there are shallow first-viewing thrills to be had with the return of the old guard, I got a sense of “going through the motions” from Han and Chewbacca, partly because they meet up with Rey and Finn entirely by accident. And because they are clearly defined as the supporting cast, the impact of Han’s death (at the hands of his son, Kylo Ren/Ben Solo) and Chewbacca’s anguish is blunted. It’s also jarring that Chewie gives Rey the nod to take over the Falcon’s controls soon after Han’s death, whereas in the Expanded Universe novels, Han was devastated by Chewie’s death. Part of that can be chalked up to the difference between media, but still.
Han and Chewie obviously have a connection with new villain Kylo Ren/Ben Solo (Adam Driver), but that connection was off-screen (and untold in any media) between Episodes VI and VII, so a viewer doesn’t feel the depth of the tragedy. It’s like we’re interlopers in someone else’s story.
While Hamill’s wordless appearance in the final scene is fine, Carrie Fisher does not come off well as Leia, now a Resistance general. It seems to be a case where she and Han still love each other, but they can’t live together due to their son toying with the dark side. Compared to her performance in the original trilogy, where she had great chemistry with Ford and an overall spunkiness, Fisher is completely untethered from the events here. Her lack of facial expressions is weird and distracting. The script doesn’t do her any favors, either, as she shares no scenes with her son. (Her son’s name, Ben, also suggests that Leia got more in touch with her Jedi side between films, although there are no explicit examples in “Episode VII.”)
“The Force Awakens’ ” villains – as far as we can see so far — are of a much lower caliber than those in the first six films. Kylo Ren is a Darth Vader wannabe. Some prequel critics complained that we got to know a young Vader in “Episode I,” but the absence of any backstory for Kylo (a disciple of the “Knights of Ren”) is a gaping hole. We are told he turned on Luke and his fellow Jedi students, but there’s no context to it. He wields a lightsaber like his grandfather, but he’s decidedly less skilled. The non-Jedi Finn even holds his own for a while against Kylo! Then Rey – who didn’t know she had Force powers till earlier that day – more or less defeats him.
Kylo’s master, seen only in a hologram, is a man named Snoke (Andy Serkis); if I had used an al-Qaida parallel rather than ISIS, this villain might be the Osama bin Laden stand-in. He’s apparently widely known as the puppet master of the First Order, as Han references his name, but any further information is withheld from the audience. It’s hard to judge Snoke’s competency: On one hand, Kylo is a pathetic second-in-command. (This fact also speaks ill of Luke’s Jedi school, but I won’t go down that rabbit hole.) On the other hand, the First Order seems like a large outfit with excellent technology – with a huge caveat: The ease with which Starkiller Base is destroyed is pathetic.
Part of why I love Lucas-era “Star Wars” is that as you delve deeper into a small detail, it becomes more interesting. The opposite is the case in “The Force Awakens,” precisely because it’s so unoriginal. The film riffs on way too many moments, both large and small, from the 1977 original – to the point where it goes beyond homage and into plagiarism; for starters, Rey tells BB-8 to get lost (a la C-3PO to R2-D2) even though you know she is attached to him. The Mos Eisley Cantina offered a treasure trove of mysterious characters; “The Force Awakens’ ” cantina is just a nod to the other cantina.
As noted, most of the planets in this film don’t have names, so we don’t get many starting points for our intrigue to begin. Everything about the attack on Starkiller Base is lazily written; I think a scant amount of screen time is spent on it because the filmmakers are embarrassed by how derivative it is. Admiral Ackbar delivers a line about penetrating shields that’s almost a repeat of “Return of the Jedi,” and by this point, the sense of déjà vu is unpleasant.
The most inexcusable technical gaffe of the film is that ships can now pass through shields via lightspeed. In “A New Hope,” the technology is clearly spelled out by Han:
“Without precise calculations we could fly right through a star or bounce too close to a supernova and that’d end your trip real quick, wouldn’t it?”
In a significant rewrite of canonical rules, Han jumps the Millennium Falcon to lightspeed from the bridge of a ship – through its shields, not even knowing such a thing is possible (that’s a question to be asked AFTER he tries it, he quips). Armed with this new information, Han uses this trick to get through Starkiller Base’s shields.
In a more minor oddity, this film’s TIE fighters have two seats: The pilot (Poe) faces forward and the gunner (Finn) faces backward, as with snowspeeders, but it often seems like the gunner is firing forward. The logistics are distractingly illogical.
In a broader sense, “The Force Awakens” feels bluntly aimed at children – like a Disney movie, in other words. While the themes are identical to what Lucas was peddling, the Disney regime seems to linger on certain moments longer so the kiddies can get the message; this style can also be seen in “Rebels,” the dumbed-down follow-up to Lucas’ “The Clone Wars.”
For example, the camaraderie between Luke, Leia, Han and Chewbacca in “A New Hope” isn’t explicitly stated; we just get a sense of it as we enjoy their escapades. When Finn and Poe meet, they immediately become friends, and their bond is stressed in every line of dialog – Disney is waiting for the littlest child to grasp that even though one guy is wearing stormtrooper armor and the other is a prisoner, they are friends now. Another blunt approach is taken with the “mystery” of Poe’s fate. Finn shows scant reaction to Poe’s supposed death, a cue to kids that Poe is still alive. As adults, we’ve all seen enough movies to know someone’s still alive if we don’t see a corpse.
The relationship between Rey and Finn has similar problems to Padme and Anakin in “Episode II”; the romantic interest is portrayed only from the male perspective, but as it turns out, the woman was interested after all. Rey feels like a “Star Wars” character (the British lilt helps), but while Boyega’s performance is 180 degrees removed from the stiffness of the prequel performances, he presents another problem: Through his mannerisms and speech patterns, Finn seems like an American living in 2015. (Disney also showed a tendency to ground “Star Wars” in modern America in the novel “Aftermath.”) The clearest example is when Finn cockily tells Captain Phasma that he’s in charge now, and Han has to tell him to bring it down a notch.
While the prequels were sometimes criticized for being predictable – because we knew it would link up with “Episode IV” – “The Force Awakens” is much more predictable, even though it has the entirely clean, unencumbered slate that Disney created when it canceled the Expanded Universe. It uses that clean slate to repeat plot and character arcs we’ve already seen, and that cancels out the fact that it’s more technically competent than the CGI-heavy prequels. “The Force Awakens” is not embarrassingly bad, but it’s certainly not good or memorable. It’s by-the-numbers, play-it-safe, stick-with-what-works corporate filmmaking. And boy does it ever work — in terms of making money. Disney’s first “Star Wars” film is how creativity dies — with thunderous applause.