If you can read this sentence, my method of hiding spoilers is not working for you and you should treat this as an entirely spoilery post.
I enjoyed it a lot! It sounds like all my bigger-Star-Wars-fan friends did too, which is great. I’ll keep this spoiler-free and then let people who’ve seen it click the spoiler buttons for what I’m specifically talking about.
It alternates a bit between three different ways you could approach making a Star Wars sequel:
- Nostalgia Trip: the same characters come back and do the same things but 30 years older.
- Mimic: new characters who are curiously similar to old ones, facing a curiously similar configuration of curiously similar enemies with a curiously similar threat, which they resolve with a curiously similar plan.
- New Story: new characters that occupy new roles in the familiar world, using them to explore new corners of it and create new situations and conflicts.
As you can probably tell from my phrasing, I like it best when it’s doing New Story stuff. A whole film of that would turn me full fanboy. As it is, the new stuff is still central enough that it kept me excited throughout.
Click for spoilery specifics
Spoiler stuff follows
I really like Rey, and that counts for a lot – I don’t know how the screen time tallies up, but the plot certainly revolves around her more than anyone. It’s reasonable to call her the new Luke, but she’s different enough to count as new. She’s stoic where he was a complainer, isolated where he had adopted family, fiercer and funnier. And she’s a woman, which is immediately refreshing.
Finn, as a character concept, is new: a turncoat Stormtrooper. I like him too, and generally very much like the idea of humanising people who were previously seen as valueless and interchangeable cannon fodder. But the fiction can’t make good on that idea. The very first thing he does after going rogue is slaughter dozens of interchangeable Stormtroopers, then minutes later whoops about it with his new pal. Once he’s out, he talks and behaves exactly like a normal, rogueish, wise-cracking, functioning member of the free galaxy. There’s instantly no trace of the fascist culture he’s lived it for as long as he can remember, where people get serial numbers not names, and devote their lives to working on ways to destroy more than one planet at once.
As I say, I like him. But taking on a big concept like that is a bad idea if the genre of film you’re making clashes with the inevitable consequences of it: that he would be fucked up, that Stormtroopers are people, that it’s not cool or fun to kill them.
Poe is not a new or very interesting character – standard hotshot – but I wanted to mention him here because Oscar Isaac’s performance makes him so charming. His fast friendship with Finn is what ends up making that character feel real, and stresses the stakes: when they unexpectedly see each other again and hug, it feels like they’ve been through something truly affecting.
Kylo is great. Aesthetically, in costume, he’s very guilty of the ‘Mimic’ side of the film – we need a Vader, dress someone up as Vader. But once the mask first comes off, he becomes something much more interesting: someone doing all the awful shit Vader did while being a person.
His inner conflict is happening visibly – he hides his face but will show it when challenged. He bullies his underlings like Vader but then can’t control his rage, to the point that it’s almost embarrassing. We’re told that he has ‘light in him’ and we see it: we hear his doubts and how he contextualises them as ‘temptations’ in a way that lets him dismiss them. He wants to look invincible, but can’t quite ignore his injuries – punching himself in a disturbing way that could be masochism, penance, or self-surgery. And his encounter with Han genuinely felt like it could go either way, to me. Which made his betrayal much more affecting than just bad-guy-does-bad, or even major-character-dies. There’s a sense of losing Ben too.
It spends most of its time in Mimic mode, which baffles me. It’s fine, I’m just puzzled that anyone, even the most rabid fan of the originals, thought that to recapture them you’d need to literally copy and paste the exact same elements and rename them as if they’re new.
Click for spoilery specifics
Spoiler stuff follows
Hero is a technically adept unwittingly force-sensitive loner on desert planet, villain is a masked man in black with a tannoy voice filter, who reports to an enigmatic seated overlord, and has a hierarchical rivalry with the stuffy and force-sceptical commander of the military wing, who he threatens but does not seem to entirely outrank, and the commander wants to use the big weapon but the mask guy wants to use the force, and the big weapon is a giant spherical object that can destroy planets – a strategy they have tried twice before, to expensive and memorable failure – and the rebels’ plan to defeat it is to have one set of people sneak in and disable its shields, and then another set to fly in and shoot its weak spot.
Again, this is the superficial stuff – even the strategic mechanics – so I don’t care that much. I like Rey and Kylo, who are new character-wise. Just bemused.
I’m not completely against a Nostalgia Trip. I like that old characters are back, and I think some of them are used well – as welcome cameos, or lynchpins of the plot. The time it starts to hurt the film, for me, is when old characters are leading the action and very pointedly doing exactly what they were doing 30 years ago. It feels like putting on a show – “Look! This is what you want! Things are just like they were!” It’s fine to do that for a moment, then show why things have moved on. But it’s more than a moment, here – some of them are lead characters, and that’s where it starts to feel like wallowing in the past.
A while ago I would have said there was no point at all to doing stuff like that. But once the trailers came out, I realised some people respond to it on a completely different level to me. When I see Han Solo again, I think “Yes, I recognise that man. There he is, on that ship of his.” Apparently some people experience something a little stronger, and this part of TFA is obviously for them. If it worked for them, it was probably worth it.
Click for spoilery specifics
Spoiler stuff follows
Obviously I’m talking about Han and Chewie here. Story-wise I really like Han’s arc: how the aftermath of saving the world and getting the girl has clashed with the personality that got him there. But for the long periods that he and Chewie are being action heroes, it has the feeling of a videogame tie-in: see the Iconic Characters do the Thing You Know Them For! Tag along, and press some switches at the right time to help them!
I’m glad that ended here, and with a moment that felt brave and galling: he’s finally forced to be vulnerable in the last way he wants to be, and is brutally punished for it.
Comments: if your comment mentions anything that happens in the film, please start it with [This comment contains spoilers for The Force Awakens] – that’s intentionally long so the spoilery bit won’t show up in the sidebar excerpts here. I’ll also turn on comment moderation for a while, to be safe, so your comment won’t pop up right away.
