Film Review: ‘The Force Awakens’ to an oft familiar galaxy
In being charged with reviving the film franchise and ushering in Disney’s new age of “Star Wars,” director J.J. Abrams had, as far as fans were concerned, one key mandate: to make us forget about George Lucas’ awful prequel trilogy. The passage of time had done most of the legwork, with those films rotting in the ground for a decade at this point. And while clearing that low bar is not the most demanding task, it’s not as though merely being better is the only ambition he or Lucasfilm boss Kathleen Kennedy had for “Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” the seventh chapter in the film series that began in 1977.
Note: This review contains some spoilers.
In their attempt to shovel the last few bits of dirt on the graves of “Episodes I-III,” however, Abrams and co-writer Lawrence Kasdan took an odd path. Instead of fully pushing forward into the future, they went further back. The result is that “The Force Awakens” comes off largely as a remix of the original three films, evoking them at every possible turn. And it’s a shame, because when the film dares to go its own way, it works brilliantly. It just doesn’t go its own way nearly often enough.
It’s almost astounding how few substantial claims to originality it attempts to make. “The Force Awakens” begins with a hero character hiding something of value in a small droid that talks in beeping noises (BB-8). The droid flees across a desert landscape until it encounters a young person who is trapped there by a personal obligation (Rey, played by Daisy Ridley) and because of circumstances beyond her control ends up fleeing the planet on a hunk of junk starship and attempting to deliver BB-8’s precious cargo to a resistance movement fighting an interstellar war against a fascist government.
Yes, some names have changed. The desert planet is Jakku rather than Tatooine. Instead of the Rebellion we have the Resistance, and instead of the Empire we have the First Order. The droid is BB-8, not R2-D2. But they serve the same functions and they do the same things and nobody who watched the original “Star Wars” film is going to miss the very stark similarities.
And those similarities hardly end there, as “The Force Awakens” manages to be the third of seven Star Wars films to feature a superweapon that destroys planets. Now it’s called Starkiller Base rather than the Death Star, and now it’s planet-sized instead of moon-sized, and now it can destroy multiple planets at once rather than just one, and now the base from which the Resistance attacks it is not the Yavin IV moon but instead some other jungle planet with temple-like structures. It just goes on and on like this. There’s even a Yoda-type figure in the middle of it.
On a technical level, it’s all improved without the technical limitations of the ‘70s and early ‘80s, but it’s also hollow because of incredibly quick pacing. For so much of the running time, it just feels like simple aping without really grasping what made the originals work: their simplicity. “The Force Awakens,” by contrast, is too full.
It’s a shame because the quick cavalcade of callbacks draws attention away from what’s new. And that new stuff is why I left the theater feeling optimistic about the future despite finding “The Force Awakens” unsatisfying overall.
The key to it all is the cast. Daisy Ridley, John Boyega and Adam Driver are all perfect, and their characters are not analogues for past heroes despite any cosmetic similarities. Rey may be the new Luke Skywalker, but she’s not much like him. She’s confident from the start, always ready to take charge. Despite being seen as a successor to Darth Vader, Kylo Ren (Driver) is everything Vader was not -- whereas Vader was a more sinister sort of evil, Kylo Ren is totally unhinged. Rather than seething, Ren constantly lashes out. His internal conflict between his devotion to the dark side and his deeper desire to not be a terrible person isn’t quiet, but out in the open.
And Finn (Boyega) is a total outlier. A kid who was stolen from his parents as an infant and raised to be a stormtrooper, Finn deserts after his first battle and only accidentally gets caught up in events. He’s the funniest character, but also awkward because he’s never interacted with anybody outside the stiff First Order military. He attaches himself to Rey and Resistance pilot Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaacs) just because they’re the first people who ever treated him with real dignity. At the start of the film he doesn’t even have a name, just the designation FN-2187 (the number being yet another callback, as that was the cell number Leia was held in the first Death Star).
Ridley, Boyega, Driver and Isaacs are all perfect for their parts, individually, together and against the returning Han and Leia and Chewbacca who act as mentors passing the torch here. The chemistry is immediate and they play off each other in exactly the way I would have hoped. And they grant the film an energy that is unheard of for the “Star Wars” franchise. “The Force Awakens” comes alive when they aren’t shoved into situations that mirror the good old days, but unfortunately those moments are too rare.
Driver in particular is the standout; he is absolutely thrilling to watch from start to finish. He plays Kylo Ren like Hayden Christensen should have done Anakin Skywalker in the prequels: as an immature, conflicted brat who comes off as terrifying rather than stupid.
Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher seem less impactful in their returns just because they’re moving at a different speed both in comparison with the fresh faces and their old selves. Han Solo may have mellowed a bit with age, but Ford is still having fun.
The strange narrative arc of Poe Dameron, by the way, is I think key to understanding the overall weirdness of “The Force Awakens.” It was in pondering his role, going from main character to minor supporting role halfway through, that I realized “The Force Awakens” is actually two films crammed together. The first recalls “A New Hope” mostly with cosmetic parallels, as the main plot setup early on is about finding Luke Skywalker. “Luke Skywalker has vanished,” the opening crawl tells us, and that’s what “The Force Awakens” is about until suddenly it becomes a different movie, with the focus moving squarely onto dealing with yet another Death Star. When the search for Luke is eventually picked up again it’s only through the most inexplicable of movie contrivances, which I guess we’ll have to wait for Rian Johnson’s “Episode VIII” to understand.
While it’s possible that the next film will recontextualize and retroactively improve “The Force Awakens,” for now we’ll have to settle for what is merely a passable “Star Wars” experience as it stands by itself.
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PHIL OWEN is a Los Angeles critic.