First FB guest post, by the Conductor of the Oscar Isaac Hype Train
Warning: if you haven’t seen Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens, an entire legion of my best spoilers awaits you.
This past December, a month peppered with many notable films, I--and apparently a legion of moviegoers--looked forward to one release above all: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens. It didn't take me long to realize that The Force Awakens borrows heavily from 1977’s A New Hope. 1
Rey is bae
Indeed, the main military and political struggle at issue in each is exactly the same. During the movie, I thought, we’ve had thirty-two years to come up with a follow up to Return of the Jedi and the best we can do is a remake of the first movie (albeit with the welcome addition of Rey, Finn, and my most passionate man-crush)? 2
Many fans have criticized the creative team (which includes more people than just JJ Abrams, namely Lawrence Kasdan and Michael Arndt but I will refer to them all collectively as JJ for brevity’s sake) for their complete lack of creativity. Here’s the cynical explanation. JJ faced a daunting task: (1) make a commercially successful movie that would please fans, critics, and casuals alike, (2) live up to unbelievable hype, (3) overcome the sins of Episodes I-III, all the while (4) taking the story into (relatively) uncharted waters. 3 I can’t stress the third factor enough. The prequels sucked. They dumbed down the original Star Wars universe, pumped it full of pointless action sequences, CGI, “kid friendly” characters, and truly awful screenwriting and acting, leaving us with 418 minutes of insulting, Disney-fied garbage. Indeed, for that reason more than any other, The Force Awakens had a lot to overcome.
We can all agree that JJ followed a predictable Star Wars formula: the evil “First Order” have constructed a planet-destroying superweapon. A rag-tag crew of rebellious underdogs, including an innately powerful hero from a backwater desert planet, get some inside information about how to destroy the superweapon. The rebels attack, while the weapon is about to fire at the rebel base, and, through luck and skill, exploit the superweapon’s exposed weakness to blow it up.
Yet, this traditional formula actually adds new information about the Star Wars universe. In contrast to something like the perennially re-booted Spiderman franchise, The Force Awakens doesn’t simply recycle the same formula without advancing the a established franchise as well. By emphasizing the marked incomptence of the autocratic antagonists of the Star Wars universe, JJ made a deliberate, thematic choice to reveal the ultimate weakness of the Star Wars villains: that they are boring drones who lack imagination. The repetitive construction and destruction of Death Stars plot is a deliberate takedown of hierarchical, autocratic organizations.
The Galactic Empire, the antagonists in Episodes IV-VI, and The Force Awakens’s First Order (together the “Bad Guys”) display the following characteristics: decisionmaking and leadership is concentrated in one, supremely evil dude (Emperor Palpatine in the original trilogy and Supreme Leader Snoke in The Force Awakens); everyone is either an indistinguishable white-uniformed stormtrooper or black-uniformed TIE fighter pilot or a similarly homogeneous, vaguely British, drab-uniformed officer; they value unquestioning loyalty and discipline; they have seemingly vast resources myopically focused on destroying the Rebel Alliance (protagonists in the original trilogy) or the Resistance (protagonists in The Force Awakens). Moreover, they have a penchant for putting these resources to use building intimidating, spherical battle stations with uncannily easily-exploit weaknesses. Star Wars Bad Guys lack diversity and, apparently, creativity. They are conformists lead by an autocratic madman. Indeed, precisely because they stifle contrary viewpoints and vest all decisionmaking in one, supremely evil dude (who is probably surrounded by terrified yes-men) they lack the ingenuity--even after the rebels destroyed two death stars using essentially the same tactics--to do anything but try it again, but, like, bigger. By contrast, they face a ragtag fleet of scrappy, swaggering, Wedge Antilles Poe Dameron types who outthink, outfly, outshoot their way to victory against every Death Star the Bad Guys can throw at them.
On this view, JJ’s Starkiller Base in The Force Awakens arguably represents more than conservative, formulaic filmmaking; it continues a core theme from the original trilogy and even adds nuance to the Good v. Evil theme at the core of Star Wars. The Bad Guys aren’t just mass murdering megalomaniacs. They’re also deeply incompetent and doomed to repeat their failures because of their conformist ways and total reliance on fear to keep the local systems in line. 4 It may be too soon to tell whether The Force Awakens truly triumphs as a standalone film but for now it offers an interesting perspective on the nature of the original trilogy’s main antagonists.
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Attentive fans will also note some cute and almost certainly intentional allusions to Empire. E.g., the scene where luke’s saber is in the snow and Kylo Ren tries to force grab it, just like Luke had to do when he was upside down and about to become a wampa’s breakfast. It’s even the same lightsaber. The Han/Ren showdown on a narrow walkway in some kind of giant metal chasm also parallels the Luke Vader showdown in a similarly narrow, similarly inexplicable giant metal chasm somewhere in Cloud City. Admiral Ackbar and Nien Nunb make cameos in a nod to Jedi as well. ↩
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Newly-minted Oscar Isaac fans should check out A Most Dangerous Year. ↩
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The vast, vast collective lore of the “Expanded Universe” notwithstanding, there isn’t really anything guiding where the post-Jedi movies “have to” go because they happen after the original trilogy. The prequels had something of a playbook because the original trilogy dictated the key events that had to have transpired earlier. ↩
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This theory has the added benefit of pandering to the stereotypical Star Wars fan, whom I (snarkily!) picture as a 20-40 year-old quasi-libertarian dude who probably works somewhere in “tech,” likes the idea of meritocracy, and dislikes big institutions. ↩