The prequels are about a man who didn’t know when to let go. The original trilogy is about a man who knew when not to.
Leading up to the release of Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens, I’ve had doubts about whether or not I would enjoy the film. For one thing, while I like some of JJ Abrams’ work, I don’t quite trust him as a filmmaker. Let me explain. Star Trek 2009 is a perfect place to start. I’ve grown up a fan of both Stars, Trek and Wars. I appreciate the philosophical musings and social commentary of Star Trek, and in my younger days at least, was a true believer in Gene Roddenberry’s vision of the future. So when Trek got rebirthed in 2009 with a new young cast playing the familiar TOS crew, I was curious.
The film was a fun, action-packed thrill ride and I appreciated a lot of what it had to offer, but like many fans I noted with some dismay the lack of a big idea, the unwillingness on the part of the film to ask its audience to think, to weigh any important ideas about the social issues we were facing in 2009. Still, I reasoned, it’s a “getting the band back together,” movie, they’ll do the smart stuff in the sequel. Only they didn’t. Star Trek into Darkness was pure garbage, a rehash of the first Abrams Trek film with a darker tone, louder sounds, and a lot of dialogue lifted from “Wrath of Khan” used to no valuable effect. My goodwill was used up where NuTrek is concerned.
So here I am, fresh out from Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and I’m disappointed again. I had a number of things I was worried about with Episode VII, and all of them came true. To put this in context, let me talk about why I love Star Wars. Then I’ll be able to show why this one fell short.
When George Lucas created Star Wars, he did so only because he had failed to obtain the rights to Flash Gordon. He has a love for old b-movies and the Republic Pictures serials. He also has a love of classic cinema, from Akira Kurosawa films to John Ford westerns and classic epics like Lawrence of Arabia and Ben-Hur. So when he couldn’t do Flash Gordon, he made up his own version of it, and that was Star Wars. He threw everything into it that he liked. Its DNA contains flying saucers on strings, cowboys and Indians, The Wizard of Oz, Camelot, Robin Hood, high-seas swashbucklers, gunfighters, aerial dogfights, chariot races, the fall of Ancient Rome, Samurai warriors, wizards, and the bad guys are basically a bunch of Nazis in space. He took universal ideas, things from across various cultures and historical eras, and combined them into something that can, as a result, speak on some level to almost anybody around the world.
These are big-budget b-movies, Republic Pictures serials made as if they were Lawrence of Arabia. The visual style is grand and sweeping, very Old Hollywood. Lucas often includes shots that are direct references to other films. the “Ben-Hur” chariot race makes an appearance in “The Phantom Menace.” The raid on the Indian village to rescue Natalie Wood in “The Searchers” is revisited in “Attack of the Clones.” These are only two examples of a number that only George Lucas could count with any certainty. He approached Star Wars as if they were silent films – with the idea that if you dropped all the audio except John Williams’ score, you could still follow the film exactly. So all the designs in the films are carefully considered in order to help tell the story in big, easy visual cues. Hence the bad guys looking like Nazis in space, Darth Vader looking like a techno-samurai, Obi-Wan’s monk robes, Han Solo’s gunfighter outfit, the stormtroopers wearing identical armor and never showing their faces — they were clones from the start. That was always the idea.
And then to get another level into it, there’s the spiritual component. I have no idea if George Lucas is religous, or if so what religion, but I do know that he’s spiritual. He used to race hot rods when he was a teen and he had a bad car wreck that should have killed him, but he was able to walk away. And I know that moment changed him. So amidst the rest of these divergent-yet-weirdly-convergent ideas, Lucas brings The Force, and meditations on love and loss, the power in knowing when to let go. The prequels are about a man who didn’t know when to let go. The original trilogy is about a man who knew when not to.
“The Force Awakens” hits the ground running, and so many of the things you want to see are there. Space Nazis, Han and Chewie, lightsabers, at least one triangular capital ship. It’s a nice-looking movie, but cinematographically it’s not at all a Star Wars movie. It doesn’t use the same visual language. Ships, weapons, and characters come and go, often without us ever getting a really good look at them. There’s very little soul to the film. The spiritual underpinnings feeling notably absent, any connection to real world history or classic cinema missing right along with it. There are emotional moments, to be sure, many of them very effective. There is humor, but it often seems improvised and is clearly rooted in 2015 language and culture, and much of the dialogue is going to feel dated in five years.
“The Force Awakens” also tells us that 30 years after the end of “Return of the Jedi,” many of that film’s earned happy endings came undone. This is not an encouraging thought, and combined with the film’s near-total lack of spirituality, it’s not an easy film to think of as “fun.” It’s a strange juxtaposition to go from ROTJ, the sunniest film in the saga, to this dour, flippant, loveless voyage of glossy emptiness. Star Wars may have created the modern blockbuster, but it’s always been beyond that, the big-budget b-movie made like it was Lawrence of Arabia. “The Force Awakens” is just a modern blockbuster with lightsabers. Deep as a puddle.
Conclusions? Like the First Order’s new superweapon, it appears JJ Abrams sucks the life out of a “Star” every time he fires.
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