Star Wars: The Force Awakens

Film (2015)

With Harrison Ford (Han Solo), Mark Hamill (Luke Skywalker), Carrie Fisher (Princess Leia), Adam Driver (Kylo Ren), Daisy Ridley (Rey), John Boyega (Finn), Oscar Isaac (Poe Dameron), Lupita Nyong’o (Maz Kanata), Andy Serkis (Supreme Leader Snoke), Domhnall Gleeson (General Hux), Anthony Daniels (C-3PO), Max von Sydow (Lor San Tekka), Peter Mayhew (Chewbacca)

Some years after Luke Skywalker Mark Hamill), Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher) and Han Solo (Harrison Ford) had their day in the sun, things have returned to a not very good state.

A resurgence of interstellar fascism, now under the name The First Order and ruled by a new creepy kind of emperor, Supreme Leader Snoke (Andy Serkis), who has a Darth Vader stand-in, Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) as his lieutenant, threatens to take over.

Coming up against them are Finn (John Boyega), a good-natured storm-trooper runaway and Rey (Daisy Ridley), a young female space-junk dealer who seems to have some untapped natural space talents. Filling out the scene are a cute new little robot and some old friends.

There’s the equivalent of the old Death Star which packs a lot of destructive power and the recurrent need to drive a bunch of little waspish attack ships into just the right place to get the big death machine to quit what it’s ready to do.

If it sounds familiar and your memory calls back forty years ago, there’s a reason – the plot here is not all that different from the plot of the original. After the generally lukewarm reception of the second trilogy of the epic (1999-2005), the move here is to recapture what was once good and solid and popular in the original trilogy (1977-1983) and it seems to have worked in some ways. Certainly, the result is very popular – already the film has broken every box office record in sight – but the actual cinematic rewards are more modest.

There are certainly a group of decent young actors here.

Adam Driver (Kylo Ren), who made his name on the TV hit on HBO, Girls (2012 -), here gets dolled up in a kind of Prince Valiant way to serve in a major role. Driver is a naturally charismatic and interesting actor, but here there’s an odd prettification of his looks that seems weird, and whatever they’ve done in directing him also draws away from his natural sassiness and oddball charm. They would have done far better to cast him in the role of a new, young Han Solo type than they did by casting him in the role they did here.

Harrison Ford (Han Solo) does get to show up and do his stuff, and he’s great. He’s indeed forty years older, but still has a craggy, angular charm that comes through. We should all be so dashing in our early seventies. His partnership with the charmingly non-verbal Cherwbacca (Peter Mayhew) is one of the great buddy motifs in modern films and one is not disappointed to get a taste of that here.

Carrie Fisher (Princess Leia) also returns, handsome and middle-aged, with some poignant reflective moments with Han Solo and their errant progeny. Who knew? It’s actually an interesting narrative twist, though it’s not so clear the film does as much with it as it might.

Oscar Isaac (Poe Dameron), who made his name in the Coen brothers’ small film about Greenwich Village folk musicians Inside Llewyn Davis (2013), has skipped quickly across several large streams to get here. He was, earlier in the year, the odd, solitary billionaire computer mogul in Ex Machina (2015), a role for which he was not particularly suited. Here he comes off better, as a kind of young Al Pacino type who brings some neighborhood charm to the warring cosmos, a street-smart New York kid who’s all of a sudden found himself in another galaxy.

Domnhall Gleeson (General Hux), a fine young Irish actor, plays the grim chief of staff on the evil side, a dutiful yes-man role which he carries off with appropriate creepiness but which provides an acting opportunity well beneath his considerable capacities.

As the new may-the-force-be-with-you young heroine, Rey (Daisy Ridley), has a convincing gritty determination that wins over all. It’s a pleasure to see a woman move onto center stage in the embattled strength and wits department and she does quite a good job of rising to the occasion. I’m not sure why it seems obligatory to have a young woman with a British accent fill this kind of role; is it meant to give her a level of character that an American accent couldn’t offer? The only other characters in the original who had British accents were Alec Guiness as Obiwan Kenobi, and Anthony Daniels, who played, and plays here, the robot C-3PO.

John Boyega (Finn), as the ex-storm-trooper and the guy who is there with Rey every step of the way, has an easy open grace and fills the bill just fine. That he’s African-American adds another welcome dimension.

Lupito Nyong’o (Maz Kanata) has a great turn as the Yoda stand-in, the ex-space-pirate proprietress of the watering hole where the young space heroes pause briefly. Apart from her Iris Apfel goggle-glasses, she could be Yoda’s cousin, and though she doesn’t have as much gymnastic-linguistic capacity as Yoda, she has tons of charm.

At the outset, Max von Sydow (Lor San Tekka) adds the obligatory sagesse and gravitas, paving the way for the interstellar hijinks which follow in unremitting succession.

The CGI is, of course, very good, and the improvements in that arena make the battles and explosions that much more effective as time goes on. I saw only the non-3D version, so I can’t comment on the quality of that or the added wonders provided by IMAX.

The Force shtick is still a compelling narrative element, and there’s a nice Excalibur moment when a light saber flies into the hand of the person meant to wield it.

I am curious about one narrative element, however. Isn’t The Force the sort of thing, like other cosmic traits, that’s just there? What’s this all about The Force awakening? Does it go into hibernation? Certainly there’s something interesting about the way that Rey connects with The Force in this film and certainly that’s what the title suggests, but it would have been nice to get a little more sense of what this behavior of The Force is all about somewhere between all the time devoted to space pods zipping around and things getting blown up.

Given all these little successes, there are lots of small pleasures in the film, which goes on for two hours and fifteen minutes of more or less relentless action.

Despite all of that action, however, and the charms of the old and new characters, I found the film – I hate to say it – a bit boring. It relies so generally heavily on its old narrative frame and its time-worn techniques for cinematic success that it seems far less an interesting innovation than a return to old formulas. The young woman hero and the addition of an African-American sidekick are nice innovations but not enough to make for really exciting developments.

Nevertheless, adding a couple of twists of character and story to those formulas seems to be just about enough to have turned this into a blockbuster. Despite its huge public success and unstoppable critical appeal, it’s not really as great a film as everyone seems to think it is. It’s a pretty good outer-space action film that brings back the charms of the original installments but does not break enough narrative new ground to make it really interesting.

– BADMan