Tag: Space Opera

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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