Star Wars: Enthusiasm Awakens

[swan_tower]

(Minor spoilers ahead, but no major ones.)

I went yesterday to see Star Wars: The Force Awakens on a 3D IMAX screen, because really, there are some things that are just kind of cool to go virtually flying through. But lest you think I’m way behind the curve, this was not the first time I’d seen it, nor even the second; it was the third.

Partly this is because of a quasi-joke I made a while ago about “girlcotting Star Wars.” If staying away from something or refusing to buy it for political reasons is a boycott, then, I reasoned, actively going out to support or purchase it for political reasons should be called a girlcott. (Yes, I know the etymology doesn’t remotely work that way.) A Star Wars movie with a white woman, a black man, and a Latino man in leading roles? Yes please. A Star Wars movie whose crawl text blazes with the words GENERAL LEIA ORGANA(1), one where there are women taking up blasters to defend their village and female X-wing pilots running around the Resistance base and Gwendolen Christie as a Stormtrooper captain? Yes, yes, yes. I would have gone to see it even if it were terrible; I might have gone to see it twice. Fortunately, Abrams gave me something much better than terrible — he gave me Star Wars.

Because I’ll be honest: in hindsight, the prequel trilogy just doesn’t even feel like Star Wars to me. Sure, it has Jedi and Sith and lightsabers and spaceships and so on. But the opening crawl text of The Phantom Menace is all about a Trade Federation and frickin’ taxation. Where’s the EVIL EMPIRE? Where’s the noble REBELLION? Not here yet, I know, I know . . . but that’s part of the problem. Star Wars is supposed to be sweeping and epic. When its crawl text sounds petty and mundane, you’re off to a bad start. But right from the opening lines of this movie, and then the beautiful shot of the Star Destroyer eclipsing the planet . . . it felt right. And it continued to feel right the whole way through, so that I walked out of the theatre energized and excited, and the spoiler-free review I gave to people in the following days consisted of clasping my hands in front of my chest, going starry-eyed, and bouncing on the tips of my toes.

With more distance and further reflection, writer-brain is fascinated by the relationship between this movie and the source material. I disagree with those who say, eh, boring, it’s just a retelling of A New Hope. Does it use many of the same elements? Yep: desert planet, rescuing a prisoner from the bad guys, a bar filled with colorful aliens, a big scary weapon that has to be destroyed(2). But those elements get used like Lego blocks: you can build lots of things out of them. One of the things I love about it is the way that, although you can find points of correspondence between this and A New Hope, none of those points become a line that runs all the way through. Poe feels like Han Solo (hotshot pilot), but he’s also Leia (dedicated member of the Resistance, captured by the bad guys and then rescued), and as Todd Alcott points out, he’s also kind of a high-speed Obi-Wan to Finn (from a political rather than mystical angle). Rey may look like Luke — orphan on a desert planet — but she doesn’t dream of getting off the planet and doing something cool; she wants to stay on her planet (and get back to it once she leaves) because she’s waiting for something important there. Maz Kanata’s bar is not where our heroes come together; it’s where they split apart, and Maz herself is one of two Obi-Wans to Rey (the other being, from a backward angle, Kylo Ren). And there’s just zero precedent for Finn: a humanized Stormtrooper, a “bad guy” who face-turns right out of the gate and offers the other heroes an insider’s perspective on how the faceless masses operate.

To discount all of the deeper changes just because the surface looks familiar is, in my opinion, a mistake. Sure, maybe you could have had this plot with Rey growing up on a jungle planet and other such superficial changes. But that would have jettisoned the psychological effect I can’t help but think Abrams intended: “look, guys, we’re getting back to basics. Forget about the prequel trilogy. Remember what you loved about Star Wars. I’m going to give you that experience, and take it in a new direction.”

I’ll admit that I was apprehensive about Abrams directing. I’m fine with his Star Trek movies; they’re not brilliant, but as somebody who has zero emotional investment in the franchise, I found his films very enjoyable. My concern here wasn’t so much that he would screw Star Wars up as, it would now feel the same as Star Trek. As it turns out, that fear was unfounded: I think Abrams successfully poured himself into the mold of this franchise. Because it really is true that my immediate reaction upon walking out of my first viewing was a satisfied sigh of “now THAT was Star Wars.” Better than that — it was Star Wars plus, where there’s more than one woman, and not everybody is white, and the characters speak dialogue you can imagine coming out of the mouth of an actual human being.

I can’t wait for the next one. <clasps hands, starries eyes, bounces on toes>

***

(1) While waiting in line at a coffee shop over Christmas, I picked up and idly flipped through a Star Wars: The Force Awakens book written for very young children. The first page I flipped to began with the line, “General Leia is a princess.” Which might possibly be the most awesome sentence in the history of children’s literature.

(2) I will grant that I could have done with a bit more variety on the whole super-weapon thing, because it really is an Even Bigger Death Star. But I would have been satisfied with a single change: if you’re going to call it Starkiller Base, in homage to Luke’s first-draft name, then have it kill stars! Not by draining them, but by BLOWING THEM UP. Send the Hosnian sun supernova. That would have been awesome.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

Comments

[dhampyresa]

“General Leia is a princess.”

Even better, she's a Disney princess.

I loved this movie.

[swan_tower]

I sadly have not found enough fan-art of other Disney Princess with lightsabers . . . .

[dhampyresa]

SADLY.

(General > Princess, tbh.)

[bookblather]

YES oh my gosh. When I was nine I went with my dad to see Return of the Jedi in the special edition release, and now that I'm twenty-seven I went with my dad to see The Force Awakens, and it was EXACTLY THE SAME FEELING. I was so, so happy. I'm still so happy. I need the DVD immediately.

[swan_tower]

It's gonna kill me, having to wait!

[siduri1959]

I might add...

People 50+ with wrinkles and gray hair are totally part of the action on some level. Like...we are still alive past 50, ya know?

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Yes, that too! I think they did a nice job of bringing in the characters from the original trilogy in a way that let them be relevant and interesting, without having them take over the story.

[reedrover]

“General Leia is a princess.”

I think my heart just grew back up a size.

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

Yay, like "President Hillary was a First Lady", or from 2008, "You mean Hillary has a husband who used to be President?"

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I love it because (since the book was written relative to the most recent movie) it's phrased that way rather than "Princess Leia is a general." One of those is a rank you achieve; the other is one you just get born with. I like prioritizing the former over the latter.

[sovay]

The first page I flipped to began with the line, “General Leia is a princess.”

That is beautiful.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

See my comment above for why that phrasing particularly pleases me.

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

What you say reminds me of "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull", which I loved. CK didn't do switches on the tropes, but the timing/beats were there, and lovingly right.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Ooof. I . . . rank Crystal Skull above Temple of Doom? Which is about all I can say for it. To me it felt like a bad genre shift, dragging aliens into a setting that had always been about mystical pulp tropes. Between that and the refrigerator at the beginning, it both began and ended on the wrong foot for me.

[sovay]

Between that and the refrigerator at the beginning, it both began and ended on the wrong foot for me.

I really enjoyed seeing Crystal Skull in New Haven, where the university scenes—including the extensive chase scene across campus—were filmed while I was still technically a graduate student at Yale. It may remain the only movie I've seen in theaters where the scenery got a standing ovation. Then I was really sad that there is not actually a statue of Denholm Elliott on Old Campus. I would have left flowers if there were.

(I found the movie itself very frustrating. The infamous refrigerator is followed by a genuinely chilling and resonant image, the dazed, battered Indy in the shadow of the mushroom cloud—a pure artifact of the 1930's in horror of this brave new world—but it belongs in another and much better movie. The whole atmosphere of chariots-of-the-gods interdimensional aliens in Mesoamerica, flying saucers and paranormal Soviet researchers, should work right off the prevailing mythologies of the 1950's in the same way that Raiders iconically distilled '30's pulp. And yet, somehow: nope. Nuke the fridge.)

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

But these aliens were arceologists!

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Re: Abrams: Riffing off past criticisms, I'd venture the problem isn't his making Star Wars feel like Trek, it was making Star Trek feel like Star Wars.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I can see that. And since I always liked SW better than ST, I'm less likely to be upset by that shift than other people.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

I'm very much not a Trekkie, but I'll channel one and note that ST had black men and white women in charge over 20 years ago... (Plus a Native American as second.)

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Oh, it's far more progressive than SW was. I just never cared about it because Gene Rodenberry explicitly said he believed that the human race would "evolve" past social conflict. Draining 90% of the internal tension out of the setting made it too utopian to be of interest to me. (Corollary is that the one series which ever hooked me much at all was DS9, which is also the one most driven by basic interpersonal conflict.)

[tiamat360.livejournal.com]

I can’t help but think Abrams intended: “look, guys, we’re getting back to basics. Forget about the prequel trilogy. Remember what you loved about Star Wars. I’m going to give you that experience, and take it in a new direction.” This was precisely my impression as well. Spoiler: the death of Han Solo is completely emblematic of this, in my opinion

[ashnistrike.livejournal.com]

So much love and squee. They made a Star Wars movie for us.

I liked the Starkiller, actually, because it seemed emblematic of the First Order's tendency to try and legitimize themselves by grabbing ideas from the Empire--and for that matter, from the Jedi. See, we have something just like the Death Star, but bigger and better and with, um, a longer charging time LOOK OVER HERE WE HAVE A SITH.

By the way, I don't suppose you remember the name of the kids' book? We have very young children who might like it (although they are also the reason we haven't been twice yet).

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

By the way, I don't suppose you remember the name of the kids' book?

I don't, no -- there's a whole slew of them aimed at different ages, though.