Tag: Movies

So there’s a new STAR WARS movie in town.

Yup, we finally saw Rogue One, on the day after New Year’s. This was not due to any lack of enthusiasm, mind you, but simply the travails and tribulations of trying to find large blocks of time for seeing movies around the Holiday season. Rogue One thus turns out to be the first Star Wars movie that I did not see in its opening weekend since The Empire Strikes Back.

No, none of that matters or has any bearing on what I thought about the movie. So, what did I think of the movie?

Short version: I liked it, quite a bit. I had some complaints and quibbles along the way, but there was nothing in this movie that I found disturbing or annoying (well, almost nothing). So I liked it a lot more than I liked The Force Awakens.

Nothing in this movie is necessary, which an interesting place to start. When Disney bought Lucasfilm, and Star Wars with it, the lay of the land very quickly became clear. Disney was not going to be content with the six existing movies, and they immediately greenlit Episode VII. They soon thereafter made clear that they weren’t going to be content with the old model, either, wherein the new Star Wars movies were spaced three years apart. No, they wanted at least a movie a year, in order to make the Star Wars “cinematic universe” almost as much a going concern as the Marvel one. Now, I’m not sure we’ll ever get to multiple Star Wars movies a year, but until these things stop making money, we’re getting at least one a year.

However, Disney knew that they couldn’t get Episode VIII done that quickly, so they announced a series of stand-alone films that would alternate with the “Saga episode” films. Rogue One is the first of these, and we learned very early what it would be about. Remember back to the opening crawl of the very first Star Wars movie ever? Episode IV: A New Hope (once known, quaintly enough, simply as Star Wars) starts off by giving us this bit of background:

It is a period of civil war. Rebel spaceships, striking from a hidden base, have won their first victory against the evil Galactic Empire.

During the battle, Rebel spies managed to steal secret plans to the Empire’s ultimate weapon, the DEATH STAR, an armored space station with enough power to destroy an entire planet.

Pursued by the Empire’s sinister agents, Princess Leia races home aboard her starship, custodian of the stolen plans that can save her people and restore freedom to the galaxy….

Rogue One is the story of those Rebel spies, the ones who manage to steal the secret Death Star plans while the Rebel ships are busy winning their first victory against the Empire.

In all honesty, when I heard that this was what Disney was doing with this movie, I wasn’t terribly thrilled. This is simply not a story that anyone has ever wanted to hear, is it? Has anyone ever wondered about those spies and how they stole the Death Star plans? I certainly haven’t. It’s like wondering why no one has ever made a movie telling the story of those ill-fated German couriers with the letters of transit in Casablanca, the ones whose murder by Ugarte (Peter Lorre) is reported in that film’s first minute. We don’t need a movie about how a single scientist on the planet Krypton diagnosed that world’s doom; what matters is that world’s single survivor, the baby Kal-el. Nobody needs to see the tale of how Ben and May Parker came to be the guardians for young Peter.

But someone decided that the theft of the Death Star schematics was a story that needed telling, so tell it, they have.

In truth, I still wonder about that. I wonder if this film isn’t partly an attempt by Disney to have the cake and also eat it, by making a standalone Star Wars film that is nevertheless pretty safe. The Star Wars story is so well-known by this point that not much background needs established in Rogue One, and indeed the film gets started and off to the races pretty quickly. There is apparently some technical problem with building the Death Star, and the Empire needs the services of one of its geniuses to fix it. The genius, however – a guy named Galen Erso – is living in seclusion on some planet someplace – hiding, in fact – and the Empire goes to get him, sending Director Krennic himself to fetch the genius. Krennic is the officer who is actually in charge of building the Death Star. After some stuff in which Galen’s wife is killed and his daughter Jyn goes into hiding, Galen is taken anyway.

Flash forward fifteen years or so, when young adult Jyn finds herself targeted by the newly forming Rebel Alliance, because of her father’s position as designer of this new “giant weapon” that they’ve heard the Empire is building. The rest of the film is mostly about that: the coming together of a team of ragtag rebels, each with a different specialty or skill, as they set out to steal the plans for this new super weapon, called “the Death Star”. Somehow Galen has coded a message to Jyn, and when she plays it, he tells her that he has built a weakness into the armored space station.

So basically Rogue One is a kind-of The Guns of Navarone in space, with all the various trappings of Star Wars. For the most part, the film is gripping and entertaining. It’s on the long side – maybe a little too long, especially during the ending sequence which pretty much abandons the main story in favor of some straight-up fanservice, but more on that in a bit. And somehow, despite maybe being a little too long, I felt like we never really got a good feel for the characters aside from Jyn and the droid K-2SO. Even Cassian Andor, the Rebel agent who gets the whole thing rolling by busting Jyn out of Imperial prison, is something of a cypher.

We learn even less about the rest of our ad-hoc strike team. There’s an Imperial pilot who has defected, although we never really learn why. We likewise don’t learn a whole lot at all about our blind warrior-monk or his mercenary friend, aside from the fact that we need some bit of mysticism in a Star Wars movie, and these two provide it. This is actually interesting: Chrrit Imwe, the blind monk, is nevertheless apparently a Force-user of some sort – or at least, he is someone whose life evidences a certain devotion to the Force. He keeps saying “I am one with the Force and the Force is with me,” almost as a mantra, and it’s hard to make the case that he’s not using the Force at points. Again, we have a broadening of the idea of Force-users – begun in The Force Awakens (although it may have begun earlier, in the cartoon shows that I haven’t watched) – who don’t fall into the Jedi-Sith dichotomy.

I don’t think it’s entirely a flaw that the characters in this film are generally fairly broadly sketched. This is a long story, with a lot of moving parts, and there’s not really a great deal of extra time to be dealing with characters backgrounds. A little more would have been helpful, though. There’s a reason why these kinds of movies, like The Guns of Navarone, tend to run on the long side. You need to establish the characters so that when they inevitably start dying, it matters. And I did feel something when some of the characters began expiring during the final battle, so there’s that. I don’t think Rogue One is fatally flawed by inattention to character, at all. I just would have liked a little more.

I was concerned during the film’s production about the tone that was promised. The filmmakers, in various statements, seemed to be indicating a very dark and gritty film was in the offing, so much so that I was worried about the Battlestar Galactification of Star Wars. This hasn’t really happened. The film is substantially darker in tone than most of the Star Wars entries – although it’s nowhere near as grim as Revenge of the Sith – but there is still heroism and even fun to be had along the way. For the most part, the movie earns its emotional beats. In fact, the film earns its emotional beats much more satisfactorally than did The Force Awakens. While I don’t think we get to know the characters as well as we should have, we do still get to know them better than we did in TFA, so when the price for victory starts getting paid, there is real emotion there.

More broadly, the film is darker than many of its predecessors, and it’s dark in a pretty interesting way. There are more shades of gray here than usual in a Star Wars movie, and the shades of gray that we see are those presented to desperate people who are presented with awful choices, as opposed to the shades of ever-increasing darkness we see in people who are moving from the Light Side toward the Dark. Rogue One gives us characters who aren’t in it for the goodness of the cause, but who aren’t motivated by money or power either.

My biggest complaint with Rogue One lies not with the heroes but with the villains. I’ve read a lot of praise for the film in this department, so maybe I’m in the minority here, but I don’t think the movie is entirely successful with the villains. Director Krennic, who is supervising the building of the Death Star, is pretty uneven. At times he is a technocrat, seemingly interested only in what he’s building as an intellectual exercise. This is the most interesting version of him: the man who wants to build this appalling weapon mainly to see if he can do it at all. He doesn’t seem terribly interested in the Empire itself, or vested with any special loyalty to the Emperor. However, at other times he is presented as mustache-twirlingly as every other Star Wars villain, most notably in the film’s opening scenes when he visits ruin about Galen Erso’s family in order to secure his assistance in his project.

Krennic is at times a fearsome commander, and at other times a fearful lackey himself. We meet Governor Tarkin who bosses Krennic around left-and-right, and we also have Krennic visiting Darth Vader himself on what I assume to be Vader’s “home” (a castle-like fortress built over a literal river of molten lava on what looks kind of like Mustafar). A lot of people were thrilled to see Vader in this movie, but in none of his scenes did he seem necessary to me. Vader’s inclusion felt like it was stuffed into the movie almost as a means of “rehabilitating” the image of Vader. The most common trope I’ve heard is that Rogue One made Vader “scary again”, and that it was finally cool to see Darth Vader cut loose with a lightsaber and do evil shit. I point out that we saw exactly that in Revenge of the Sith, just that back then it was his pre-black suit days. A lot of fans don’t seem to consider Vader Vader until he’s ensconced in the black armor and the iron lung, which seems wrong to me.

Likewise, the film’s last few minutes don’t work for me. Again, lots of people love those last few minutes, but for me they feel wrong somehow. Vader chasing Rebels through the corridor with his lightsaber, while they are doing a relay-race thing to get the Death Star plans onto the Tantive IV, was kind of a reach. Likewise, Princess Leia’s appearance in the very last scene didn’t work for me at all. In fact, it pretty much kicked me out of the movie entirely. Part of that, I’m sure, was the jolt of having had Carrie Fisher die just a week or two earlier, which cast a pall over the scene that there’s no way the filmmakers could have predicted.

But in terms of story, that bit doesn’t work for me either. This implies that the beginning of A New Hope takes place literally minutes after the ending of this movie, for one thing. For another, it doesn’t fit with what’s established at that film’s beginning. When Vader takes over the blockade runner at the beginning of A New Hope, Princess Leia protests that she is a member of the Imperial Senate on a diplomatic mission to Alderaan. Vader knows that he claim is bullshit – “If this is a consular ship, where is the ambassador?” – but Leia wouldn’t even be able to make that claim with a straight face if she has just literally fled the scene of the Battle of Scarif. Likewise, Vader’s lines to Leia – “Several transmissions were beamed to this ship by Rebel spies” – doesn’t work at all if the plans weren’t transmitted but rather somehow run by a series of heroic-but-doomed Rebel soldiers who just manage to hand it through the blast door before it seals.

There is also too much Tarkin in this movie. I have to admit that I lost some interest in the various political machinations between Tarkin and Krennic as the film progressed. A little of this stuff went a long way, and Rogue One has too much of it. It takes focus off Krennic a bit, and worse, it lessens him. Krennic becomes something of a pathetic figure by the film’s end, not a fearful one, and in honesty, he’s not even essential, is he? We have him on Scarif at the end, giving us the confrontation that it seems we have to have – villain and hero in a mutually precarious spot – but I have to admit, by the time we got the Battle of Scarif really rolling, I’d lost interest in Krennic. His worst moment has to be the way it takes him a very odd length of time to realize that the Rebels are here to steal the Death Star plans, and this ends up feeling to me like Die Hard’s Deputy Police Chief Dwayne T. Robinson: “I think they’re goin’ after the lights!”

I don’t want to rip on this stuff too much, but I do think this points up a certain structural flaw with this story as it’s conceived. It’s The Guns of Navarone in Star Wars, but we can’t end with the destruction of the guns, can we? Our big victory here is the acquisition of the plans, which we know happens during a big battle. For me, everything that comes after our heroes have won – after Jyn and Cassian die, having beamed the plans out – is pretty much filler.

I also don’t want to be too hard on the movie for its big action climax, because aside from the very last moments, it’s a fantastic battle. I love that the stakes keep rising as more and more ships get involved, until the Death Star itself shows up. The “limited power blast” from the Death Star’s superlaser is a good touch. I did find the digital re-use of battle footage from A New Hope distracting, but…well, when you’ve seen a movie as many times as I’ve seen A New Hope, there’s not really a way to avoid that, is there? This battle is hectic and violent and thrilling, it’s edited together beautifully, and I like that there are real objectives, not just The Force Awakens’s final battle which boils down to “Hit it as hard as you can!”

Oh, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t address the fact that Rogue One fixes a major plot hole in A New Hope – or at least, that’s what a lot of people say it does. Luke Skywalker is able to destroy the Death Star by taking advantage of a tiny weakness in the battle station, and this film gives us an explanation as to why the Empire was dumb enough to leave that weakness in there (it was actually planned sabotage by Galen Erso). It’s ridiculous, the idea seems to be, that the Empire’s ultimate weapon can be destroyed so easily, by firing a torpedo down a thermal exhaust port.

Here’s my problem with this line of thinking: This is not a plot hole and it never has been.

The complaint always seems to be along the lines of, “Why would the Empire build such a huge weapon with such an obvious design flaw?” Or, “Why is the Death Star so easy to destroy?”

Well, in the first place, let’s consider the kind of story that Star Wars is. For all its spaceships and planets and rockets and laser guns and whatnot, it’s a mythic story, and most of its tropes come from mythic fantasy, not from science fiction. And in mythic fantasy, the trope of the Immense Villain with the Tiny Weakness is a very, very old one. We’re talking David-and-Goliath here, or Beowulf-and-Grendel. Odysseus versus the Cyclops. Bard versus Smaug.

The Death Star’s weakness, small and unnoticed, is perfectly in keeping with these kinds of stories. Complaining about it years later is to misunderstand the whole nature of the tale.

But here’s the other thing: the Death Star is not easily destroyed! Consider the Battle of Yavin. General Dodonna briefs the pilots:

The Empire doesn’t consider a small one-man fighter to be any threat, or they’d have a tighter defense. An analysis of the plans provided by Princess Leia has demonstrated a weakness in the battle station.

The approach will not be easy.

You are required to maneuver straight down this trench and skim the surface to this point. The target area is only two meters wide. It’s a small thermal exhaust port, right below the main port. The shaft leads directly to the reactor system. A precise hit will start a chain reaction which should destroy the station.

Only a precise hit will set up a chain reaction. The shaft is ray-shielded, so you’ll have to use proton torpedoes.

Remember all that? And remember the room full of pilots murmuring at the inherent difficulty of the task? Remember Wedge protesting that it was “impossible, even for a computer”?

No, the Death Star was not easily destroyed. Thirty ships made up the attack force. Only three end up returning. Of the thirty that flew, only two actually got to take a shot at the exhaust port, and only one actually hit it, and that was because that pilot had decided to use the Force instead of his computer when making the shot, and he only got to do that much because of the timely intervention of a particular space pirate.

Destroying the first Death Star was not “easy” at all, and when people imply (or state outright) that it was, it seems to me that they’re cheapening one of the great action sequences in all of movies. And that, I cannot abide.

(No, this isn’t just me defending the honor of my favorite movie, either. I can admit flaws in my favorite movies. See the Fixing the Prequels posts, or note my admission that my love of Casablanca aside, the letters of transit really are complete bullshit.)

I also think that there was probably a bit too much fanservice in Rogue One. We have Darth Vader, of course, and Governor Tarkin shows up (more than I expected, to be honest). But there are walkers in battle, and a Mon Calamari commander of the Rebel fleet. Bail Organa shows up very briefly, referring to his need to enlist an old friend of his (Obi Wan Kenobi, we assume) before saying that he has to get back to Alderaan. (We, of course, know that he will never leave.)

Some fanservice is fine, but there does get to be too much. An unnamed Rebel pilot with the Red Five call sign is shown dying, explaining how Luke Skywalker gets to have that same call sign at Yavin. Footage from A New Hope shows us Red and Blue Leaders. A land battle involves Imperial walkers. Earlier in the film, Jyn Erso bumps into someone on a crowded street, who turns out to be the very ruffians that Luke Skywalker bumped into in the cantina in A New Hope. I found a number of the callbacks distracting, and I do hope that future Star Wars films have less of that, moving forward. (The Force Awakens also had way too much fanservice for my taste.)

What does all this mean for Rogue One, then? Well, I’m not sure that the movie really needed to address the “weakness” in the Death Star at all. It really only serves to give Galen Erso a more sympathetic nature, I suppose. If not for that whole business, I wonder if audiences would have been nearly as invested in Jyn’s search for her father. I’m not sure, because the movie would be different without it. How to make Galen sympathetic if he goes along with building the Death Star? I’m honestly not sure. But anyway….

I don’t want to seem like I’m being too negative on Rogue One, because it really is an engaging movie, and probably the most directly satisfying trip to the galaxy far, far away in some time. I do wish the villains had been a bit more even, and I’m not at all sure that we needed Darth Vader at all. Those are not major complaints, though, because the movie mostly gets the story with its heroes right. It’s a long movie, but I really wasn’t much conscious of the running time, and as the final battle unfolded, seeing the fates of the characters unfold was still highly effecting. (None of this can possibly be a surprise, can it? In this subgenre of the war movie, it’s gotta be a given that most of the heroes are going to die.)

It will be interesting to see how the future “standalone” Star Wars movies fare. The next one is the Han Solo movie, which I maintain still must be titled, Never Tell Me The Odds.

(First image credit)

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By this point, it probably sounds like I hate The Force Awakens and want to excise its memory from every human mind. Not so. My complaints are real, and they frustrate me to no end, because…dammit, there is just so much that this movie gets right. The Force Awakens feels to me like the filming of the third draft of a script, when it really needed a fourth.

I also suspect, in terms of the film’s refusal to explain things, that this is part of a New Media strategy for Star Wars. Remember, Disney specifically declared that the old “Extended Universe” material is no longer canon, and that everything else from now on would be. Not just the stuff in the new movies, but all of the comics now being produced, all of the novels, all of the animated teevee series, all of the events depicted in games. If all this is canon, then it’s clear that Disney can now relegated background material and its explanation to other media formats. Thus The Force Awakens can plow ahead and not tell us anything at all about this old geezer who just happens to have the piece of Luke’s map that will solve the puzzle, and then later on, they can come out with a novel or comic that explains it.

Well, I hate that. I don’t want to have to do extra research to enjoy a movie, or the reverse. If I read a novel, I shouldn’t have to go see some other movie to explain just what’s going on. I’ve no doubt that a lot of this stuff is going to be fleshed out, and I’ve little doubt that a lot of it will be in other media. And I find that incredibly irritating.

But anyway, let’s talk about what’s good with The Force Awakens, starting with the cast.

With one exception, the cast of this film is brilliant and does an amazing job. (The exception is the guy playing General Hux, with his weird blend of Hitler and Anglo-Shatner. I frankly hope that Hux is killed in the first scene of Episode VIII. Along with Captain Phasma…but her failure is one of writing, not acting. Hux is both.)

Seriously, aside from Hux, nobody in this movie turns in a bad performance. In fact, the performances are so good that they really do lift the movie above what I see as its pretty significant problems in the script. Daisy Ridley plays Rey with a nearly perfect blend of confidence in her short-term planning (once she decides to do something, she’s ruthlessly competent and very skilled at sizing up exactly what needs done), and lack of confidence in the big picture. Whenever she’s confronted with the “larger world” beyond her crappy little hole on Jakku, her confidence disappears, because she doesn’t know what she’s supposed to do or want. Ridley’s performance in this movie is as perfect as it gets. I love her strength, her emotion, and her refusal to give up or withdraw into a shell when things get bad. Rey never loses her agency, and that’s really a great thing. Not even when she’s a prisoner does she lose her agency.

Likewise, John Boyega delivers a powerfully skilled performance as the “little stormtrooper who could”. It’s clear that Finn should never have been on that mission to Jakku, but he was, and that’s how a lot of stuff gets started. Finn has skill and training, but he lacks confidence and has to keep doing things like telling himself to be calm and grabbing Rey’s hand, more for his own comfort than hers. Finn is naïve, and in some ways he’s even a child, but he also has a lot of training and is able to call on it in a lot of situations. Best of all, when he realizes that his training is useful, there’s always this little hint of surprise in his eyes: “Hey, guys, I’m contributing!” Even when it’s something simple like “Fly low! It screws up their sensors!” or “Stormtrooper masks filter smoke, not toxins.”

Oscar Isaac is perfect as Poe Dameron. I do wish the script had given him a little more to do during the final battle than just keep saying “Hit it with everything you got!” and then deliver so supremely melodramatic a line as “As long as there’s light, we got a chance!” I don’t have any idea if they plan to go any deeper into Poe Dameron, or if he’s going to be Wedge Antilles with a bit more screentime, so we’ll see.

And yes, I know that Han had to die, because of reasons and structure and Hero’s Journeys and all that stuff. But dammit, Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher are just so damned perfect together. It’s a bummer that they’ll never be together again on the Star Wars stage. I love the scene when they meet each other again – “Same old jacket.” “No! New jacket.” Harrison Ford really brings his A-game here, and it’s nice to see. His self-satisfied smile as he stands in the Falcon cockpit, his look of dismay as he realizes he’s about to go right back into his old world of Luke and the Force and the rest of it…and my favorite little Solo moment, when after Kylo Ren leaves that one planet with Rey in captivity. Finn runs up to Solo and says something like “They took her! They’ve got Rey!” and Han, who has just seen his son in action and is realizing just how bad things are likely to get and knows that he’s about to be face-to-face with Leia, waves Finn off with a gruff “Yeah, yeah, I know.”

The Force Awakens is also a beautiful film. All the Star Wars movies are beautiful, really; one thing that I’ve always loved about Star Wars is that the eye candy is always beautiful and real, whether it’s the miles-high cityscapes of Coruscant or the dawn clouds of Bespin or the forests of Endor. The Force Awakens keeps this tradition going. We get a desert planet, to be sure, but this movie makes Jakku different enough that we know we’re not just on a Tatooine stand-in; this film’s forest planet is entirely different from ones we’ve seen before, and the Starkiller Station planet is icy without being Hoth again. Abrams has a strong gift for visual flare, and I’m glad that he actually made this movie look like a Star Wars movie, with ships that move with weight and with nifty things like the X-wing assault coming from low across the lake and the Millennium Falcon exploding from the trees.

I also like the film’s implications regarding Force users. The previous six films have all focused on the Jedi and the Sith, but it’s pretty much a matter of faith that there are Force users who are neither. Even the Jedi are prepared for this: in The Phantom Menace, when they learn of this kid who might have more Force-potential than anybody else ever, they’re prepared to send him back to Tatooine and be done with him. The Force, remember, is originally described to us as an energy field that surrounds us and penetrates us and binds the Galaxy together, which ought to make it much bigger than just the Jedi-Sith divide. In fact, what if the Force’s moral “sides” turn out to be less rigid than both Sith and Jedi have always thought? If so, then maybe the “awakening” of the Force, referenced in the film’s title, represents the Force itself starting to shake off the dominant narrative regarding its nature for the last thousand generations. Maybe, just maybe. And maybe not…but The Force Awakens does make some interesting leans in that direction.

What else is good in The Force Awakens? Every action sequence. I’ll give Abrams his due here: he is a very good action director. He manages kinetic energy on the screen very well, and it’s almost always easy to figure out exactly what’s going on. He also manages to make his camera do the right thing from one shot to the next, such as one time when we’re swooping around the sky with Poe, and then we cut to Finn, with the camera still swooping (albeit in closeup) as Finn cheers and shouts, “That is one hell of a pilot!” The first Millennium Falcon sequence, with the TIE Fighters in the desert, is brilliantly done, as is every action sequence in the film. This is no surprise: JJ Abrams managed the hectic action very well in both Star Trek movies (say what you will, the action sequences in those films were not poorly shot or directed) and in his Mission: Impossible movie.

What I love most about The Force Awakens will surely not come as a surprise to anyone familiar with me. John Williams’s score is fantastic. It might not be quite The Empire Strikes Back good, but it’s right up there with every other Star Wars score to date. There’s the undeniable thrill that comes with that magnificent opening fanfare and the opening crawl, but then we start getting the new dark music right off the bat, with the opening sequence – the attack on the Jakku village – culminating in a powerfully bleak motif for Kylo Ren. Next, though, comes the theme that is the heart of this film’s score: Rey’s Theme.

For Rey, John Williams spins some particularly wonderful magic. The theme is lyrical, but not in the usual Star Wars sense. The theme is beautiful, but it is also yearning and hopeful, and it bears some melodic resemblance to the famous Force Theme; more than that, Williams imbues Rey’s theme with a rhythmic sense of urgency and unrest, first with a repeating ostinato that is, in itself, quite the ear worm but later on with a churning under-rhythm that gives Rey’s theme its sense of forward motion.

The score also revisits a number of themes from the Original Trilogy: Leia’s Theme, the Love Theme for Han and Leia, and even the Imperial March, quoted when we see Vader’s wrecked mask. Williams brilliantly repurposes the old Rebel Spaceship Fanfare to stand for the Millennium Falcon herself, and the Rebel Resistance Fighters get their very own march, which is brassy and thrilling. The use of this march lends a sense of legitimacy to the Resistance: this isn’t a group of rag-tag Rebels anymore. Williams does not repurpose the Imperial March for the First Order; neither does he use the Emperor’s old theme in reference to Supreme Leader Snoke. Maybe this is by design, maybe not (recall, the old Imperial March didn’t show up until The Empire Strikes Back). The music from The Force Awakens is one of the most exciting and listenable scores I’ve encountered in years.

With all my complaints about the film’s execution in its details, I do think that it leaves things in a very intriguing place. Everything depends on the next two Episodes, obviously, but there are lot of amazing places to which Episodes VIII and IX can go, based on what’s been established here. I’m not going to make any “educated” guesses – or the other kind – as to the major questions left behind by The Force Awakens. I’m not sure if I hope Rey turns out to be a major relative of one of the beloved heroes and central families, or if I hope Rey’s parentage is similar to Taran’s in Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain Chronicles (we never do find out who his parents are). There needs to be an explanation for who Supreme Leader Snoke is and where he came from, and if Finn is Force-sensitive, that needs explained and fleshed out as well.

What I hope does not happen is any kind of redemptive arc for Kylo Ren. We’ve gone down the “Good side to the Dark side to the Good side” road again, and somehow it will just seem a bit repetitive to do that for Kylo Ren. Besides, quite frankly…I’m not really interested in seeing the guy who killed Han Solo get any kind of reprieve, even if it is something like “Somebody has to say aboard and pilot the Death Star III into the sun! Tell my mother I love her!” or some such. Kylo Ren is not a menacing villain; he’s a pathetic one, and pathetic villains need to stay pathetic until the moment their pathetic nature takes them to ruin. Kylo Ren is no Darth Vader. He is Gollum with a better hair cut, and that’s how he needs to stay.

So, there we have it: The Force Awakens, a fun film to watch that has a lot of great things going for it and which also has a lot of things about it that are maddening. Which, I think, makes it what it is: a pretty decent Star Wars movie.

Next up: Rogue One this winter, then Episode VIII next year, and then (I think) the Han Solo “origin” movie. That could be fun, but I do hope it’s not too much origin – I wouldn’t mind just a straight-up young-Han adventure. In any case, I think a major opportunity will be missed if that film isn’t called Never Tell Him The Odds: A STAR WARS Story.

Until the next movie, Star Warriors!

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Continuing my examination of The Force Awakens, from the standpoint of character, my stance continues to be that the film does some things well, but not all of them, and not enough. This also applies to character.

(First, let me just get this out of the way: General Hux is terrible. Seriously, every time he’s on screen in this movie, I find myself wincing, worst of all during his Space Hitler speech before unleashing the Starkiller weapon. I don’t know what happened there, but Hux sux.)

(Oh wait: Captain Phasma also sucks. She’s useless and terrible. Her silver armor looks awesome, but in terms of what she gets done in the movie? She’s barely competent at all, between “I don’t know why the janitor I put on that really important mission turned out so poorly” and “Oh, you have a blaster to my head? OK, I’ll turn off Starkiller Station’s shields so your ships can take a whack at blowing it up.” Phasma is terrible. Hux and Phasma: Well, they don’t make ‘em like Grand Moff Tarkin or Admiral Piett anymore, I guess.)

A big deal was made about the movie’s return to beloved characters from the Original Trilogy. Well, Luke Skywalker doesn’t show up until the very last shots, and for the first half of the movie (before Starkiller Station takes over), he’s one Maguffin in a movie full of ‘em. Luke, like Maz, is less a character than a plot point. We’re not really told much at all about why he’s hiding on some distant planet, other than he tried training some Jedi and it went horribly wrong (the implication is that Kylo Ren slaughtered them), and he took his ball and went…someplace. Did he run away out of shame? Or is he licking his wounds until he can rise again and confront Kylo Ren? Guess what…the movie doesn’t tell us.

Then there’s his sister, Leia. She might be handled the best out of the entire batch of characters in this movie. Her place is relatively established; we know what she’s doing and what her role is. The unexplained stuff, with regard to Leia, is more about the film’s murky political stance than anything else. I honestly don’t have much problem with Leia in The Force Awakens. I like her leadership, and I like how the film didn’t make her Han Solo’s angry ex (if she’s even the ex at all).

But then there’s Han Solo. I loved seeing him again, but…well, look. I hate that he basically regressed into being a total loser after his son Ben became Kylo Ren. I really, really, really don’t like that. First, he says that “he went back to the only thing he was ever good at”, which is total BS. Han Solo was good at an awful lot of stuff, which is why he was successful, first as a smuggler (dumping his cargo at the first sign of an Imperial cruiser aside), and then as a military leader for the Rebellion. And not just when he became a General: he was a de facto Rebel leader at the beginning of The Empire Strikes Back; when he decides that he has to go pay his debt to Jabba, both Leia (who isn’t owning up to being in love with him yet) and General Riekkan voice their dismay. The idea that “the only thing I was ever good at” is flying around a shitty cruiser in deep space, looking for the ship that got stolen from him, simply feels wrong.

I made this point in a few different places, and I got a similar response each time: These are realistic reactions to something traumatic happening to one’s child. They saw their beloved son turn to the Dark Side of the Force, and then Leia threw herself into her position as a military leader and Han turned into…a loser. My problem with this argument? I don’t watch Star Wars for the realistic family relationships. That’s what Battlestar Galactica is for.

None of that stuff really added up for me. It ends up negating Han’s arc from the Original Trilogy, when he went from the cynical space pirate to the man who found something to believe in. Now, we’re told, he’s lost everything he ever believed in after all. I don’t know that it had to be this way. It’s nice to see Han Solo again; he has a lot of great moments in this movie. His satisfied smile as he stands in the Millennium Falcon cockpit; his “I always thought the Force was mumbo-jumbo” speech…he has a lot of fine, fine moments. But I didn’t like his starting point.

As for his ending point…well, that brings us to Kylo Ren, doesn’t it?

I found it interesting that after years of having people tell me that one reason the Prequels are terrible is that Darth Vader is basically revealed as a whiny teenager, along comes Kylo Ren, a villain so whiny that I expected to see Tom Brady’s face beneath the mask when he removed it. Before I saw the movie, I saw all manner of commentary about how great a villain Kylo Ren is, but…well, he’s OK, but he suffers from a lot of what holds the other characters back: We don’t know who he is or what he wants.

Seriously, what is Kylo Ren trying to accomplish? Well, we know a few things: he’s looking for Luke Skywalker, presumably so he can kill him and end the Jedi, but other than that, the film leaves Ren’s motivations in the dark. Sure, he tells Darth Vader’s helmet that he will “finish what you [Vader] started”, but that scene stands by itself with no context at all, and what did Darth Vader start, anyway? What is Kylo Ren getting at, here? I honestly don’t know. Killing all the Jedi? Taking over the Galaxy? Is he plotting to destroy Supreme Leader Snoke? We don’t know. All we know is that Kylo Ren is trying to resist the “call of the light”, that he’s keenly interested in Rey, and…that’s about it, actually.

Only, that’s not it: we know that he is Han and Leia’s son, and once Han and Leia meet again and start talking, the film finally gives some explanation. Not much, but a little. Their son was apparently deeply troubled; apparently Han and Leia saw his dark potential early, and Leia sent him to Luke to be trained, in hopes that Luke would keep her son from falling to the Dark Side. Unfortunately, Luke failed, and Kylo Ren killed all of Luke’s students.

That’s a pretty interesting bit of background, isn’t it? We’re being told that Kylo Ren was born evil. Han even says, “He had too much Vader in him.” But they still believe that he can turn back the Force’s good side. Leia hasn’t given up, and neither has Han, because when he has the chance, he goes to confront his son.

The problem here is that we’re given nothing to go on, regarding how and why Kylo Ren fell to the Dark Side. The nature of his temptation is neither explained nor even hinted at, which ends up making me feel like Kylo Ren is here because it’s a Star Wars movie and by God, you have to have a bad guy with a red lightsaber. It’s Star Wars law. Nothing is fleshed out about Kylo Ren in any way, except that he’s evil, he’s tempted by good, and he has a pair of very famous parents.

Maybe this doesn’t seem important, but to me, it is. Character motivations matter. Character histories matter. Again, we don’t need a half-hour of Kylo Ren’s history to establish any of this; leaving details in the dark is entirely permissible. This film, however, once again gives us nothing to go on. And if you respond “Well, the Original Trilogy never established how Darth Vader was tempted!”, I’d say you’re partially right, and so what? The OT had the task of establishing all of this stuff, so the point of establishing Vader in A New Hope as a fallen Jedi isn’t so much to say something about Vader but to say something about the Force and what can happen when its power is misused. Evil is established as a tempting thing. By the time we’re into our seventh movie about this stuff, though, that’s a given. Why did Vader want power? The Prequels give us very real reasons for that. Seriously, though: ask these questions. What does Kylo Ren want, and why does he want it?

The movie doesn’t answer these questions, and in my opinion as a writer, those are the most important questions that one can ever ask about a fictional character. The only time anything every really crystallizes in terms of what Kylo Ren wants is when he is finally confronted by his father.

This is clearly the film’s most interesting scene. The way it’s written, the scene makes us think (or tries to, anyway) that Kylo Ren is fighting the Dark Side, and that he needs his father’s help to turn back to the light. Unfortunately, we realize all too late that it’s the exact other way around: Kylo Ren wants to renounce the good side completely, and he can only do this by killing his father.

This is interesting because it’s a reverse of Return of the Jedi, isn’t it? Back then, in order for Luke to finally become a Jedi, to lay claim to his destiny, both Yoda and Obi Wan tell him that he has to confront Vader. The meaning of this is not lost on Luke, and he protests: “I can’t kill my own father.” To Luke, the very idea is evil and horrible, even though Obi Wan is insistent, first saying “You must face Darth Vader again,” and then sighing and concluding that everything is lost when Luke says that he can’t do it. For Luke, killing his own father is unthinkable, and this is reinforced when the Emperor continually goads Luke into attacking.

Thirty years later, though, here is Kylo Ren faced with the same task: he has been told that he has to kill his father in order to complete his own Force journey, but his is toward the Dark side. For Kylo Ren, killing his father is the ultimate act of evil, the point beyond which he can never turn back toward the light once he does it. And kill Han Solo he does, running him through with his brilliant red lightsaber.

This moment was not a shock to me, owing partly to my general unavoidance of spoilers at the time (I wasn’t seeking spoilers out, but I generally don’t care all that much if someone “spoils” a story for me, as “finding out what happens next” is only one reason for following a story, and hardly the most important one) and to my general familiarity with the Star Wars approach to the Campbellian story structure. Han Solo was cast as this film’s Old Mentor, and the Old Mentor always has to die. The only real mystery was in how it would happen: would he sacrifice his life to destroy Starkiller Station? Would something else happen?

The death of Han Solo was a sharp moment in the film, which is why it’s too bad the film basically ignores it afterward. Yes, it does. Han is never mentioned by name again after he dies. There is some initial wailing and crying, by Rey and Finn and Chewbacca; on the Rebel Base Resistance Base, Leia gets this look like she’s just been clubbed in the stomach…as if three voices have suddenly cried out in terror, a disturbance in the Force…and that’s about it. Leia and Rey share a crying embrace when Rey finally arrives at the Resistance base, but as the two haven’t even met until then, the moment doesn’t feel “real” to me. Han is never mentioned by name again in the film after Kylo Ren runs him through, and worst of all? Chewbacca’s grief is never dealt with.

At the moment it happens, Chewbacca wails and starts blasting everything he can and he detonates the charges…and then? That’s it. No acknowledgment of Chewie’s horror at seeing this man with whom he’s lived so much of his life, with whom he has shared so much, die in such a fashion. And consider: that’s Han Solo’s son killing him. Chewie would have known young Ben Solo. He would have once considered Ben Solo a friend, as much a part of his family as Leia or Luke or…Han himself. I grant that the movie can’t stop in the middle of the Starkiller Station battle to give Chewie much more than a few howls, but afterward? No funeral? No ceremony of remembrance? No one going to cry on Chewie’s shoulder and vice versa? Not even a mention of Han Solo or of the act of evil that took him?

I’m sorry, but that’s pretty weak tea, and it reduces Han’s death – which is a powerful, powerful moment – to little more than a required plot point, and this movie does an awful lot of reducing what should be important characters and things to mere plot points.

(Interesting thought I had after seeing an amazing Kylo Ren cosplay on Tumblr: What if Kylo Ren had been a woman? That might have been interesting. We’ve had a lot of father-and-son stuff in Star Wars; maybe it’s time to explore the mother-daughter dynamic in terms of the Force and whatnot. Of course, maybe that’s where they’re going with Rey, but by being all coy with the whole “We have to hide her real identity for at least another movie!” bullshit, Kasdan-and-Abrams-and-company write themselves out of some very interesting story possibilities. It doesn’t all have to be about saving the revelations for later, folks.)

Ultimately, I think that’s my problem with the approach to character in The Force Awakens. Motivations are muddy and unexplored. Histories are left in abeyance all over the place. It’s the same problem with the plot in general: Very little is explained. How long are we supposed to wait for the explanations? Storytelling is far, far more than just a matter of making sure you have a lot of revelations to unveil toward the end of your tale, and the way this is shaping up, the last third of Episode IX is going to feel like the biggest episode of Scooby Doo ever, with masks being ripped off to reveal Old Man Carruthers all over the place. I really am getting sick of the “We have to keep our secrets as long as humanly possible!” approach to storytelling. It’s ruined a lot of teevee shows that just had to have their big long secret-filled mytharcs, it’s ruined book series that end up treading water while we wait for the Big Reveals, and now it’s in danger of ruining Star Wars.

It’s too bad, too, because it means that JJ Abrams won out in establishing the film’s storytelling. Lawrence Kasdan isn’t perfect, but when it comes to character, he’s better than this.

To be concluded with some actual praise for this movie! No, it ain’t all bad, folks — there’s a lot that I really did like about The Force Awakens, and I’ll get into that in this post series’s finale!

Part Five: It Ain’t All Bad

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So, if I found the basic story bones of The Force Awakens unsatisfying on a lot of levels, what about the other area where the film has been picking up major praise: its characters? Well…it’s actually a lot better in that regard than its main story. But I still have problems.

Let’s start with our new hotshot pilot, Poe Dameron. We meet him very early in the film, since he’s the one General Leia Organa has sent to fetch the map from the old dude whose name is never mentioned. (Yes, I know that he has a name and that it’s probably in the credits and that it’s something like Los Mekka Ban or Los Lobos Bananas or something like that, but he’s not important and frankly he’s not even a character so much as a plot device, so I’ll just call him “Abner Ravenwood”.) We get some nice glimpses of Poe’s personality here: he genuinely seems to care about his droid, telling BB8 that he’ll be back for him, and he’s calm in the face of a sudden crisis. This is a fellow who has been through a lot of fighting and battling, and nothing much phases him, not even being forced to his knees in front of Kylo Ren.

There’s something else I found interesting about Poe Dameron, though: he is very quick to size up any particular situation and decide his course of action. At no point in the film does Poe look flummoxed, or at a loss as to what to do next. He sizes up Finn almost immediately; he calmly figures out how to fly a ship with which he’s unfamiliar; he manages to get himself from being lost in the middle of a desert back home. Poe Dameron is confident and competent, but he never seems particularly cocky about it, which is interesting.

And, as our next character tells us, he is “one hell of a pilot.” And if there’s one thing that a good Star Wars story always needs, it’s a character who is one hell of a pilot. If the movie walks right up to the brink of adding a CGI twinkle to Poe’s eye, well…fine.

That brings us to Finn. I love this guy. John Boyega plays him almost perfectly. Boyega nails every one of Finn’s emotions, so we know that he is really feeling the things he is feeling. (I know, that’s not a very good way of putting it, but we’re gonna go with it.)

The problem with Finn is that, like so much of this story, things about him aren’t explained sufficiently for them to make sense.

Late in the film, Finn admits that his job on Starkiller Station was sanitation. This is probably intended mostly as a joke, so we can see the look on Han Solo’s face when he realizes that everything is hanging on the actions of an Imperial First Order janitor. Still, I didn’t have a problem with that, really. In fact, I didn’t have a problem with that at all. After all, why not? We’ve already had a moisture farmer save the Galaxy, so why not a janitor?

The problem here is that if you’re going to posit that Finn was a janitor, then you have to explain in some way just why he was in the contingent of stormtroopers being sent on a mission led by Kylo Ren himself to hopefully recover a very important artifact. Otherwise, you’ve got a janitor being sent along to blow up the Guns of Navarone, and that doesn’t work:

GREGORY PECK: Who’s that guy?

DAVID NIVEN: He’s a janitor.

PECK: What’s his specialty?

NIVEN: He cleans the toilets.

PECK: But in terms of this mission–

NIVEN: He’s useless, sir.

Here’s this incredibly important mission, which Kylo Ren thinks sufficiently important to threaten Space Hitler General Hux while possibly disobeying Supreme Leader Snoke, and in the relatively small group of stormtroopers is a guy who seems to be seeing his first action ever. Does that seem right? Maybe it does…if the film establishes Finn as some kind of special stormtrooper. Of course, we see that he is, but why do the Imperials First Order folks?

And like always, this could be done so easily! Just slip a line or two into the scene where Kylo Ren and Space Hitler General Hux question Captain Phasma about him:

PHASMA: FN-2187. He reported to my division for reconditioning.

HUX: Has he shown any signs of insubordination?

PHASMA: This is his first offense.

HUX: It says here that the Jakku village was his first action. Why would you assign so inexperienced a soldier to such an important mission, Captain?

PHASMA: He has been training heavily. His aptitude marks are off the charts. There was nothing in his profile to indicate any such moral questioning of the Order.

HUX: There is now.

See? Just like that you establish that Finn’s special (for some reason), give him a bit of history, and so on. But the movie didn’t bother. Instead, Finn’s allegiances and motivations are pretty sketchy throughout the entire film. That doesn’t have to be a problem, but absent some more explanatory material and heavy lifting by the script, it is. Maybe it sounds like I’m quibbling and splitting hairs, but I don’t think so.

Consider: Finn tells us that he has never known any family or any life outside of the First Order. The implication is that the Order is taking babies and literally raising them to become stormtroopers. Finn doesn’t tell us that he once had a name but they took it from him; he tells us that he’s never had any other name outside of his alphanumerical identifier within the Order. What’s more, Captain Phasma tells us that he’s never shown any signs of insubordination until his break from the Order. This either implies that there’s something very special about Finn, or that there’s something very overrated about Imperial First Order indoctrination techniques. His break comes from seeing a single one of his combat mates killed and leaving a smear of blood on his helmet.

That’s not all about Finn, though, and while his background is problematic given the way the script handles it, there are other fascinating things about him. Finn seems to latch onto new friends as soon as he meets them, forming emotional bonds very quickly. Is this a fault? I don’t know. I’m not inclined to think so just yet. It may be a part of who he is, which would be interesting; that stormtrooper who dies on Jakku, wiping his own blood on Finn’s mask – what if he’s a friend Finn had just met? That would be interesting, but if that aspect of his character vanishes forever, then I may have to suspect that his insta-bonding with Poe and then Rey was just a plot contrivance. And that would be a pity.

(By the way, to step away from character for just a moment…we’re never given a timeframe for how long it’s been since Return of the Jedi, but I’m assuming it’s roughly thirty years. Well, we’re told that all of these First Order goons were taken from their families and raised as stormtroopers. That’s a hell of a lot of stormtroopers, innit? Wouldn’t the Republic notice something like thousands of babies being stolen from someplace? Then again, maybe not, because they also didn’t notice a planet being reworked into Death Star 3.0. Anyway….)

And then there’s Rey.

Who is she? We know virtually nothing about her. We meet her as a scavenger, digging through old, crashed Star Destroyers for parts that she thinks are valuable. Is she a mercenary in this? Not quite, because there’s a brief throwaway scene that shows her scrubbing the parts she’s found, in a very slave-like way. Not to say that she’s a slave, but she is clearly in thrall to the partsmonger (whose name I don’t recall and am not looking up).

In terms of exposition, Rey is probably the best thing in the movie. She’s very skilled at getting around, she knows what she’s looking for and how to get it, and she’s willing to work very hard at it. The fact that nobody else is scavenging the ships that she is scavenging suggests that it takes a very good scavenger to get at the parts that are worth anything at all, but it’s too bad the film’s dialogue doesn’t give any kind of confirmation. She just plunks her parts on the counter, the partsmonger gives her “portions”, and that’s it. But why not:

PARTSMONGER: And what have we today? More parts from that old Star Destroyer?

REY plunks the parts on the counter.

PARTSMONGER: Ohhh…impressive. Lots of old pilots swear by these. I figured they were all gone from that wreck.

REY: I know where to look. No one else even tries.

PARTSMONGER: These are worth…one portion.

Some gibbering weirdos online have suggested that Rey is too talented, to the point that it makes her a “Mary Sue” (which is not quite the standard use of that term, but whatever). The piloting issue could have been dealt with better, but the mechanic stuff? That’s pretty obvious from what we see early on. As for her Force abilities…well, more on that in a bit.

Rey informs BB-8 (and, therefore, us) that she’s been separated from her family for a very long time. This is a little hard to swallow, but fine. We’re given no reason for her to have not given up on them, just that she hasn’t given up on them.

Worse, though, is that the film never really gives us any idea of what Rey wants.

Characters need to want things. They need to be motivated. What motivates Rey? I have no idea. She seems to have no motivation other than to stay put and wait for her family. Over the course of the film, this doesn’t change much, at least until the film’s very end, when she seems to want something very much…but what? We’re not really told. The implication is that she wants Luke to teach her to use the Force, but that’s a supposition, really. She might want something completely different.

Her Force-abilities come out of nowhere, jump-started by Luke’s lightsaber (again, in a moment that is not explained at all, so much so that it just feels like a plot contrivance to me), and later brought forward by Kylo Ren’s mental maneuvering. The film doesn’t state this outright, either, but it makes sense: Rey doesn’t really start to do impressive things with the Force until Ren goes playing around in her head. I actually don’t have a problem with Rey discovering that she’s had latent Force-abilities all along, but again, it would have been nice if the script had taken a little more effort to establish this.

So we have two main characters – Rey and Finn – who are clearly at the start of an arc of some sort, but we don’t really know much at all about that because we have no idea what those two characters want. Finn spends most of the movie being motivated to get away from the Empire First Order, but when Rey gets captured, his motivation is now to rescue her. But what about after that? At the end of the film, has he bought into the Republic Resistance? We don’t know, because he’s knocked unconscious during the last battle and never talks again. As for Rey’s arc – again, we have no idea what she wants. Her missing family is never mentioned again after Maz tells her that “whoever you’re waiting for isn’t coming back”, but we don’t really get any idea of what’s motivating her after that, other than getting away from Kylo Ren. She has Force power, but does she want to learn to use it? We have no idea. A New Hope gives Luke Skywalker a line when his old world is destroyed and he’s forced onto his Campbellian path: “I want to learn the ways of the Force and become a Jedi like my father.” What do Rey and Finn want as the film ends? We simply don’t know, and that bothers me. Characters need to have motivations. Characters need to want things.

Rey’s arc, such as it is, seems to me to bear a bit of resemblance to another arc in another story, in which a young girl whose name starts with ‘R’ learns more and more about her latent abilities, attracts the keen interest of malevolent forces, uncorks a huge amount of whoop-ass on unsuspecting villains, and in the end becomes the pilot of a beloved spaceship after that ship’s pilot has died. Rey, in a lot of ways, is River Tam from Firefly.

(And while I’m on the subject, JJ Abrams missed a big emotional moment. When Finn and company find Rey on Starkiller Station, and Finn says “We came back for you,” that should be a huge moment. Rey has waited her whole life for someone to come back for her, and now, someone has. But Abrams lets the moment slide by with a quick hug.)

Rey and Finn kick a lot of ass, they have great chemistry, and…well, that’s about it. Kicking a lot of ass, in itself, does not a great character make. They are engaging and interesting characters, but ultimately they fall a bit flat because we don’t know what their motivations are or their desires or what they hope to accomplish. They’re basically sympathetic characters, not very well fleshed out, who are along for the ride in a story that is itself not very well fleshed out.

And that’s a shame, because they’re still really fun to watch.

This entry is long enough by now, so I’ll continue discussing character in The Force Awakens in another post.

Part Four: That Kid Ain’t Right

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