Movie Review: "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" (J.J. Abrams, 2015)

ECHOES OF THE PAST by Bennett Campbell Ferguson

Above: Daisy Ridley and Harrison Ford in “The Force Awakens.”  Photo ©Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures and Lucasfilm Ltd.

After the great scholar of mythology Joseph Campbell saw the original “Star Wars” trilogy, he marveled at the series’ villain-in-chief, Darth Vader.  To Mr. Campbell, Vader was not a monster, but a broken shell—a cybernetic creature programmed to uphold an unjust society.  “He’s a bureaucrat,” Mr. Campbell stated bluntly.  “He’s a robot, living not in terms of himself, but in terms of an imposed system.”

             That nifty insight could also describe J.J. Abrams’ “Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” which is less a sequel than it is a parasitic welding of secondhand “Star Wars” tropes.  As in the original “Star Wars,” an idealistic hero rises from a desert; scruffy rebels rush to disarm a planet-annihilating weapon of mass destruction; and (as in the dreaded “Star Wars” prequels) the spark and the spirituality that once made the series so wondrous is transmuted to stale, cinematic mush.

            It’s been three decades since the finale of the first “Star Wars” trilogy; onscreen, that same span of time has passed too.  “The Force Awakens” beings thirty years after “Return of the Jedi” (1983) during a time of crisis—once more, the galaxy far, far away is aflame with war.  Even more troubling, the noble Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) has vanished, leaving a vacuum for a Nazi-like regime called “the First Order” to play for power. 

            “But wait!” the movie squeals.  “There’s fun to be had!”  So there is when an orange, rotating robot called BB-8 falls into the hands of wayward youngsters Rey (Daisy Ridley) and Finn (John Boyega).  BB-8 is carrying a map that leads to Luke, so Rey and Finn grudgingly get into their galaxy-defending groove with a few flights and fights (“Stop taking my hand!” Rey exclaims pluckily when Finn attempts to play her knight in shining armor).

Ms. Ridley and Mr. Boyega are chipper, lively performers.  Yet Mr. Abrams never grants them narrative space to chart the turbulent emotions that must be coursing through these kids as they are thrust into an expansive, dangerous world.  Finn, we learn, was once a First Order soldier.  How did he muster the inner strength to overcome his soul-scrunching training?  The film doesn’t care about such human niceties.  We’re not supposed to care about them either.

So what does “The Force Awakens” care about?  Han Solo, to begin with, the suave, cynical smugger from the original trilogy who is played once more by Harrison Ford.  The film also devotes copious attention to its resident evildoer, Kylo Ren.  He’s portrayed by Adam Driver, who is not quite as terrifying here as he was portraying a hipster, porkpie-wearing documentarian in Noah Baumbach’s “While We’re Young.” 

            Kylo is the embodiment of the slavish, mechanical familiarity that renders “The Force Awakens” so profoundly dull.  In the first “Star Wars” film, Darth Vader made a show of strangling his subordinates; in the new film, Kylo pouts by slicing and dicing the featureless walls of his quarters, frightening his underlings.  His choreography is different from Vader’s, but he’s dancing in an identical show (this shallow mimicry bleeds into the movie’s climax, which dutifully emulates a deep space battle all too familiar to “Star”-watchers).   

            I wish I could say that this lazy Xeroxing was the most spirit-draining thing about “The Force Awakens.”  But it is not.  Near the movie’s end, our heroes charge into an icy fortress to take down Kylo and neuter the First Order’s secret weapon.  Yet the scene is made memorable mainly by the pointless murder of a beloved “Star Wars” character.

The man Mr. Abrams chose to sacrifice for “The Force Awakens” is a charmer whose crinkly eyes shine with tough mischief and weary tenderness.  And now he’s gone, which means that Mr. Abrams failed to understand one crucial thing—the reason that J.K. Rowling knew better than to kill off Hermione or Ron in the last “Harry Potter.” 

What Ms. Rowling understood was that her characters had grown so deeply entwined in our lives that we no longer saw them as figurines on a pop culture chessboard, but as old friends whose life journey we were sharing.  Slaughtering them in order to amp up the drama made no more sense than stabbing Cinderella on her wedding night.