Written by Isabel Rhodes.
![]() Don’t get me wrong it is awesome. It’s super awesome. It is directed by 2015’s most awesome director who did an awesome remake of Star Trek and stars one of the most awesome iconic actors as one of the most awesome iconic characters. It has awesome robots, awesome scenery and awesome dialogue. Finn is awesome. BB-8 is awesome. Poe Dameron is uber awesome with awesome on top. It is so awesome in fact that it looked at today’s most awesome TV Show (Game of Thrones), took one of its most awesome characters (Brienne of Tarth) and basically put her in the armour of the Original Trilogy’s most awesome supporting character (Boba Fett). But Star Wars - until all the Nerds grew up and started making films and the Hipsters decided the 1970s is now retro - never used to be awesome. It starred Mark Hamill for god’s sake and was about a moisture farmer with pet robots who got adopted by a monastic space grandpa. I remember going to see the re-release at the age of 12 and being legitimately embarrassed on behalf of all the actual grownups around me. These were films in which Rebel pilots were not hot bundles of amazing but all looked sort of like your Dad and were wearing orange jumpsuits before they were the orange jumpsuits from Star Wars. Han managed to be cool by sheer force of casting Harrison Ford but he spent all three films looking either confused or annoyed by everything that was going on around him. At no point did any of the Prequel Trilogy try to be cool. They weren’t self-aware, they weren’t hip, they weren’t knowing: they were wonderfully earnest, and I love them for it. I love the fact that, instead of being retro vinyl, Episodes I-III accepted that they were in the age of the CD and included scenes of magic Space Monks in Space Robes walking around a Space Temple and talking about Space politics. I also liked all of those things. I liked the shiny planets better than the moisture farm and I liked Ewan McGregor’s Obi Wan Kenobi better than Alec Guinness’. And not in an ironic its-so-bad-its-good sort of way, I mean I actually really liked them because, like a lot of things that fail to be awesome, they also managed to have actual ideas.
For one thing the Prequel Trilogy was different. Their problem wasn’t what they were trying to do or the direction they took the saga in; their problem was that they were massively uneven films who had one dreadful Anakin and one wobbly one, and thought that “from my point of view the JEDI are EVIL” is an acceptable line of dialogue. Yes there was too much green-screen, yes you are better off skipping the middle section of Phantom Menace, yes you can actually see Ewan McGregor trying to not die inside as he says the words “security”, “hologram” and “younglings”. But they also fell victim to an onslaught by Generation Simon Pegg who were so busy showing off about being in the cinema when Han shot first and there was no pink in the galaxy (seriously one planet with girl-themed sunsets and Gen X has an aneurysm) that they failed to realise that Revenge of the Sith is by a clear mile the best film of the lot and that the Ewoks are worse than Jar Jar. Yes, worse. Much, much, worse.
The only momentum Force Awakens is interested in is in circling around A New Hope’s navel to the point where it actually has the same plot - from frustrated-genius-pilot-on-sand-planet, through usb-in-droid, Darth-Mask-interrogation, farewell-Alderaan, to “Rebel Leader to base”-dogfight and “I was but the learner”-standoff. In fact, it was so unrelentingly similar that I wasted actual minutes of my life trying to work out how that was clever and did a thing that said a thing about some form of thing before giving up and admitting that what it actually was was meh. Say what you will about the Prequels but every film had a planet that introduced us to something completely new. From Naboo and Coruscant through Geonosis and Kamino and even Mustafar at the end, each deepened the mythology in some way: whether introducing senators or the senate, separatists, clone armies or the Jedi Order themselves. Each was also filled with things I had never seen in Star Wars before: ships that went underwater, cities that were underwater, cities that were giant planets, Jedi Temples and Jedi Libraries, double bladed lightsabres and crazy space senator hair.
“AWESOME” ends up becoming the story of Force Awakens, or rather “AWESOME - THIS IS THE AWESOME SORT OF STAR WARS, Look there’s Han Solo!!! Everybody loves him!!!... oh dear.” I know it’s less embarrassing to say Harrison Ford is cool than it is to be genuinely interested in the administrative procedure of the Galactic Senate but Harrison Ford being cool should be incidental to Star Wars, not the actual plot of it. Even if you don’t have a problem with a film about how cool Harrison Ford is, at least have a problem with the fact that that is just bleak because all it does is prove that no one today is as awesome and the 21st Century equivalent of Darth Vader is the disturbingly well-cast Adam-From-Girls. Which, among many other issues, means I now have to think of Lena Dunham when I watch Star Wars, and nobody deserves that. Weirdly, despite said Han-love-in, no one is particularly bothered that he was killed off, myself included. It’s like we all saw him hobble his way around the Millennium Falcon and agreed it was for the best. And it is! It’s very smart. But where is the value in a story if you can be so cool and distanced from it that everyone’s favourite character gets lightsabered in the chest and thrown off a bridge and you can think “gosh yes, that is rather clever and necessary to move the franchise forward”. It would be like staring into Frodo’s decimated face outside Moria and thinking “yes, that was the right decision, the loss of Gandalf will allow for some necessary conflicts to be set up within the Fellowship”. You are supposed to be sad! You remember sadness JJ - it’s in the bit of your brain that operates all the emotions beyond “oh cool”. Most frustratingly, while the Prequels had the balls to flip the status quo and move the saga from the outskirts of the galaxy to its core, Episode VII sets up a galaxy that isn’t even infinitesimally different to that of A New Hope, undoing the entire plot of the original trilogy in the process. Han is still a scoundrel, Luke is still sulking on a deserted planet and not returning the Jedi, and Leia is still with the rebellion even though no one is entirely clear on why the bloody hell it is the rebellion when the rebellion was won already. I mean seriously, who are they rebelling against? The government is on their side! Doesn’t that make the First Order the rebellion? You literally cannot be the rebellion and the government at the same time. That is not a thing you can do. Somewhere there is a more interesting film in which they admitted that fact and Leia’s government was attacked by First Order rebels. But I suspect that got lost under the desire to run screaming from anything that resembled the Prequels, and the desire to have a space base on a planet that looks a bit like Endor and a snow fight on a space base that looks a bit like Hoth won out in the end. The film didn’t piss me off because they killed Han, it pissed me off because it refused to go to Coruscant or even acknowledge that it exists. Marooning us in the territory of A New Hope with the rebels and introducing the next fully-formed Regime O’Evil means Force Awakens doesn’t have to come up with a single idea about the state of the galaxy or remotely care. Instead it slaps on A New Hope like an iphone with a cassette-tape cover, shoving us back on the rim again for no other reason than its more legit to like Tatooine than it is to like Naboo and reverting to the status quo means that you can remake Episode IV without ever worrying that Attack of the Clones happened. Maybe in the same way “do you ever wonder if we’re on the wrong side” was the Star Wars of George Bush the, “we won but nothing changed” school of thought would be appropriate to the Star Wars of Obama. But in the film’s pathological fear of anything that even remotely echoes the Prequels (including politicians, politics, talking about politics, planets where politics happens and an interest in the bits of the galaxy that aren’t a rebel base or a Death Star), we’ll never know.
It feels a little bit like Star Wars has fallen down the same wormhole that Skyfall fell down after it worked out that Quantum of Solace was incomprehensible crap. Casino Royale impressively updated Bond, acknowledging that the Pierce Brosnan-variety probably couldn’t exist in a world with Jack Bauer, and giving us a very death-of-history type villain who, rather than being an ideological warmonger with a satellite of diamonds, was a banker for terrorists who had gambled away all their money. Skyfall got itself all freaked out and ended up being about putting James Bond back in a James Bond movie to the point where I wanted to beat to death Dame Judy with an Aston Martin and never hear another Tennyson poem again. Now Disney have the SW franchise I am sure there must be pressure to make it endlessly repeatable and there is a particularly annoying millennial way of doing that where, like Doctor Who or Sherlock, the plot ceases to use your characters to explore an awesome world and story but uses the world to explore how awesome your characters are, and, by extension, your own franchise. George Lucas, for all his faults, never rolled about in Star Wars-the-genre to the point where he lost Star Wars-the-story. Stories, Hollywood, remember those - the things with the beginnings and the middles and the ends. When you stop the story the world becomes static: Emperors fall and immediately get replaced; Stormtroopers are forever lining up in hanger bays; The Jedi are always rising but never returning; and Rebels are permanently in dogfights with Death Stars on the outer rim. The only thing that changes is the face of the actor you are doing a close up of until the whole thing just starts to be like Sugababes: The Space Opera [wouldn’t you just pay to see that though]. Maybe I’ve just broken and am totally oversaturated by a cultural output in which all of us - Generations X to the Millennials, JJ Abrams to DJ Yoda and Buzzfeed - seem to be totally incapable of saying anything other than ‘ZOMFG - we used to watch THIS as a kid”. And maybe I am being impatient and I need to chill - accept that this is the first part of the trilogy and if the prequels moved the Jedi from Coruscant to Tatooine then these might ultimately move them back again. But I suspect not. Because the cool kids don’t like Episodes I-III and Episode VIII is being directed by the dude that made Jurassic Park IV - the entire plot of which (with the exception of one slightly bizarre stab at weaponised velociraptors) is basically REMEMBER HOW AWESOME THE T.REX WAS IN 1993.
Fundamentally, although I get that Force Awakens is a well-made film, I just can’t see the point of it. For all their faults the prequels avoided being a self-congratulatory Bond franchise with endless iterations and tropes and clever twists on those tropes and iterations so everyone can have fun with how well we know them all and how much we love the originals (don’t do the joke that says that that’s just because the prequels avoided being fun or clever, just don’t). I understand that you could probably make a clever point about how that is just moving the films closer to the Saturday morning sequels that the original franchise drew so heavily upon, but I think that is failing to understand why the original films were popular in the first place. Admittedly I haven’t exactly researched reception around Star Wars circa 1977 but I would put money on the fact that the appeal wasn’t “hey this is a clever repurposing of all that vintage stuff from the 1950s that I spent Saturday morning watching as a kid”. I think it was far less knowing than that and far less cool. I think people loved it because people love myths and Star Wars told a cracking one. They had plenty of moments that were outright crap, but the Prequel Trilogy, to their credit, were trying to do something other than be a clusterfuck of retro nerd-chic: they were also a beautifully earnest attempt to build mythology about a universe that at its worst was Jar Jar Binks and midichlorians [disclaimer: I actually have no problem with midichlorians. Sorry, I know I am supposed to. But I don’t care. I think they are fine.] but at its best was the Jedi Order and the Clone Wars and cities that were entire planets.
The Force Awakens is an awesome film: it’s witty, the dialogue is clever, and the new characters are super likable. But it is also the filmic equivalent of Damon Lindelof’s Bantha Tracks T-shirt or Spaced going off at the kid who tried to rent Phantom Menace; where Lightsabers and TIE-fighters are no longer part of epic storytelling - they are just awesome. The overall result is a film that falls down a wormhole of smug and ends up with emotional stakes so low that I ultimately feel more upset about random Jedi no.4 being shot in the back by Clone Troopers than I do by Han Solo being lightsabered in the chest by his own son. Maybe in a weird sort of way they are about the 2015 then. Because as the internet eats itself I can sit in the cinema watching a Star Wars character played by an actor who played a Star Wars fan in a show made by another Star Wars fan who is now making a Star Wars film about Star Wars films and using it to reference, in Star Wars, his show that referenced Star Wars. Thus causing my brain to collapse and The Future to give up trying to happen entirely, flinging itself off the bridge after Han… awesome.
This article was published on December 30, 2015. Post your views Article comments powered by Disqus |
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