This review will discuss the plot elements of only the first scene of Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
This week, the US Army announced their plan to court-martial Bowe Bergdahl. Stay with me here. Berghdal is the US Army Sargent who left his post in Afghanistan in 2009, spent five years in prison under the Taliban, and then came home as part of a controversial prisoner-swap. He will face desertion charges and a possible life sentence. What Bergdahl did seems unconscionable to many. Why he left is still a question left unanswered. What would drive a man to simply walk away from his responsibilities, into the hands of the enemy?
Of all the things to occupy the mind while watching Star Wars: The Force Awakens, I found myself thinking an awful lot about Bowe Bergdahl, the deserter. After that initial blast of John Williams music, the familiar blue “A long time ago…” and that yellow crawling plot-explainer (“Luke has vanished!”) this space-adventure fantasy begins with a massacre of such horror that it leads to desertion.
Here is the scene, the only one I will describe in detail (jump to the asterisk break below if you want to skip any plot details): We open on a desert village at night. X-Wing Pilot Poe (Oscar Isaac) is talking to an old man (Max Von Sydow) about a map. In a matter of minutes all the local inhabitants of this village will be murdered by Storm Troopers. They took no part in the events unfolding around them, but they’re dead anyway. One Storm Trooper wields a flamethrower and burns the village to the ground. There are summary executions. It is total annihilation of civilians by brute military strength, and it will lead one Storm Trooper, Finn (John Boyega) to desert his post, join the the resistance movement, and work to overthrow his government.
The heroes of Star Wars: The Force Awakens are an army deserter, Finn, and Rey (Daisy Ridley) a desert scavenger, who lives in abject poverty and gets wrapped up in an inter-galactic political maelstrom of which she wants no part. Their enemy is a superior military force of the most brutal kind. It was the Empire last time, now it’s the First Order, but they are the same kind of government: One that will murder billions of innocent people after giving Hitler-esque speeches before thousands of silent Storm Troopers.
This makes sense given what we know of Star Wars as a fictional universe, where desert inhabitants rise up against villainous government machinations. But there’s something else at work here too. That the army might show up one night and destroy a village and kill its inhabitants is a real threat for a significant portion of the world. It is said that recently-arrived refugees in the US will often sleep with their families huddled in the living room in case the army arrives and they have to flee. No questions asked, no answers given. You’re alive, then you’re dead.
The opening scene of Force Awakens managed to channel some of these thoughts; a sign that the filmmakers have made a movie with life and connective tissue that reaches into the world around it. This is a space-romp, and a successful one at that.
But the lingering image in my head after seeing The Force Awakens is not droids and X-Wing battles or lightsaber duels. I’ve seen those things before. Instead, it is the mask of a frightened Storm Trooper, smeared with the bloody handprint of his fallen comrade. That was something totally new in this world. I doubt Disney planned to open a film with a military deserter as the hero in the same week the US Army decided to court-martial Bowe Bergdahl. These things just happen.
Star Wars is back.
*
J.J. Abrams had a herculean task before him, rebooting the Star Wars Franchise. Star Wars is the Great Wall of China of sci-fi fantasy. If someone dismantled the Great Wall of China, gave you the stones and instructed you to make a new wall, could you do it? How do you build something new, something surprising, out of blocks that are recognizable to people all over the world?
So what did J.J. Abrams build from the rubble of Star Wars? Well, he built Star Wars. Almost exactly as we remembered it. The pieces of Force Awakens, the story beats, the characters, the archetypes, are all familiar. The names might have changed; the desert planet is now Jakku instead of Tattoine, the Death Star is now a Starkiller Base, but the pieces are the same.
Audiences have been living with half of these characters for almost forty years. You cannot cast Harrison Ford as Han Solo and escape the bonds that will hold you to the old Star Wars. You just give in to Han Solo and hope that the Harrison Ford can still muster up some of that old smuggler magic. Hope that Carrie Fisher can find the regal BAMF that was Leia. You hold on to those things because they are the brick and mortar you have in your kit. Then you look for places to find surprises, in character development and imaginative visuals and story-world expansion, and you exploit them where you find them.
Which makes The Force Awakens a very strange property. It is both a reboot and a continuation. At times Abrams walks the line between homage and parody; in one form or another you can find almost all of The Force Awakens in New Hope, Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi. If Star Wars fans were hoping for something totally new to arrive, they will be disappointed. There is nothing radical about what Abrams does here. But radical is not necessary for a good movie. I doubt audiences wanted something completely new, anyway.
A film like this is not well-served by analytical engagement after the fact. Fantasy plots progress through motion and adventure and need, not logic or coherence, and The Force Awakens is meant to stir-up audiences for two hours only. I was made to think of our current global climate several times in the film, and that’s a good thing. But after the fact, I had learned nothing about the world. This is what blockbuster entertainment does, and the ones that do it well live forever because the experience of watching them is sheer joy.
*
The Force Awakens is going to be a rousing success. Fans will love it, and deservedly so. That success comes from writers Lawrence Kasdan, J.J. Abrams and Michael Arendt, who create three original franchise worthy characters: Finn, Rey, and Kylo Ren, played by John Boyega, Daisy Ridley and Adam Driver.
Boyega, as the deserting Storm Trooper Finn, connects to all the fear one might have were the most powerful and evil force in the galaxy hunting you down. He doesn’t know what he’s doing or how he’s going to live, he just wants to keep out of the clutches of the First Order.
Ridley is the desert dwelling Rey. She is totally self-sufficient and though she finds herself in plenty of danger, she’s never in distress. Ridley (who has strong Kiera Knightley tendencies on-screen, a positive trait to be sure) finds an interesting emotional connection to this very familiar story-role. We’ve seen desert-dwelling youth sucked into the larger galactic political problems throughout the Star Wars Saga. But we have not seen how this sudden change would land on the shoulders of a young woman. Ridley punches up in this part; a relative unknown prior to this role, she’s better at it than either of her predecessors.
The two new heroes in The Force Awakens are moving and inspired and deserve this franchise. But the great contribution to the Star Wars world this movie makes is Kylo Ren, of the First Order. Kylo Ren is a conflicted villain, and what Adam Driver does with the part is remarkable. In a film that feels as familiar as this one, Driver’s Kylo Ren stands out in stark detail. He combines youthful anger with terrifying power, chilling desperation with magnificent ambition. Who better to contain such psychological damage than Adam Driver, who has depth and mental anguish all over his face. The boundaries of The Force Awakens can hardly contain Kylo Ren; he is responsible for much of what makes this movie not just enjoyable, but memorable.
The lift is on these actors to make these characters, and thus this new phase of the Star Wars Saga, come alive. And they do. With so many echoes and hat-tips to the original trilogy embedded in The Force Awakens, this movie could easily have been little more than a parody of its predecessors. Abrams has shown he can do just that; his 2010 Star Trek reboot was a lot of things, but it was not Star Trek. But Abrams avoids that fate by leaving his film firmly in the hands of the new kids, who do so much with the familiar parts they are given that even a J.J. Abrams doubter like me is left wondering at what might come next in this new, old Star Wars story.
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