STAR WARS, EPISODE VII: THE FORCE AWAKENS
There is a lot of enthusiasm about the new Star Wars film, and on some level it's understandable-the new film isn't as horrifyingly embarrassing as the prequels, but The Force Awakens is still a bad movie.
Like any Star Wars film, it makes little sense. I'm not even talking about the inexplicable political economy of the galaxy that has both intelligent robots and people hanging out in tents with dirt floors, or the horrifying reactionary theme of an entire galaxy being held a prisoner of fate by about a dozen closely related individuals. I don't even mean how the Force is supposed to work. Nor how the Republic fell apart so quickly; where the new post-imperial baddies, now called the First Order, get their funding; or why dogfights in space or sending ground troops to blow things up when you have spaceships, or anything like that. I mean basic stuff. Like why does Princess Jumpsword, who has a flying tractor, not park closer to the pawn shop? Why, on a planet full of thieves and scavengers, are spaceships left unlocked, fueled up, and with keys in the ignition? Why is every electrical problem solved by pulling out various wires? (Try it at home-wires tend to only be in place when actually necessary!) Why does everything take so long but happen so quickly? How many flashbacks can one person have? Why is the sibling of a living political figure considered a "myth" by many? "Let me tell you children, about the legend of Billy Carter, a mythical hero who some say wandered off into the beer brewery, never to return..."
Anyway, story. So we have a Good Stormtrooper and Princess Jumpsword and a new droid who has a magic map with which one can find Luke Skywalker, whose Jedi school went tits-up when a student went Columbine on everyone else. Like any proper savior of the universe who learned a lot about maturity and responsibility over the years, Luke...just fucked off after that. You know, I saved the universe, but now I'm sad. Blah blah ancient prophecies I'm sure it'll all work out sorry nine billion dead people laters babes. And that could actually be very compelling character arc for the next episode, but after this movie, I don't have high hopes.
Oh, there's also another guy, who is like the new Han Solo, but he isn't in half the movie. A not-very-loose paraphrase: "I thought you were dead!" "Nah." But mostly it's Good Stormtrooper and Princess Jumpsword.
One big issue is that every dramatic problem in this movie would have been solved had email been invented before FTL propulsion. For whatever reason, there is interplanetary communication and even instant communication between ships and a homebase that are light-years apart, but nobody decides to send the easily agitated baddie Kylo Ren an email with bad news. Instead it's one First Order weaselfuck after another reporting to his office to say "Gosh, we fucked it up again, Coffee-Pot Head" and then he gets angry and uses magic on them. The bad news of course is that Good Stormtrooper and Princess Jumpsword have teamed up to get the Luke map to the Republic and also to the Resistance which certainly isn't the Republic's own regular military but...uh I dunno. There weren't even twenty years of shit novels to explain this.
THE GOOD NEWS is that Kylo Ren has taken a page from the second new Star Trek film and decided that the problem with the Death Star is that it wasn't big enough. So he makes a bigger one, with an ecology (which is actually cool!) and this one works by sucking down "the sun" (not "a star", "the sun") and then spitting it back out at planets it doesn't like. And so Kylo Ren does just that to the planet where the Republic is hiding and the movie is over. No wait, he doesn't do that in the first act because the entire government is...on a secret planet? But that makes no sense! Okay, he doesn't do it in the second act because...he doesn't like genocide? Nah, he ordered a whole village killed four minutes into the movie. But he needs the Luke map! But why does he? Surely, Luke only matters if there's a Republic for him to support and be supported by, right? Even with all his Force powers and shit, he's still just a dude. If Kylo blows up the whole Republic, which he could do at any time because it only takes half an hour to eat the sun and spit it back out at people, he should!
But there COULD BE a reason why! For Kylo Ren is actually Ben Solo(?), the son of Han and Leia. So maybe he has warm feelings for them and doesn't want to blow up his mother? That could have gone a long way to both solve this plot problem and give us a reason to believe that Ren is feeling "seduced" by the light side of the force. Eh, fuck that shit, we'll just have him talk to himself in a room for three seconds to Darth Vader's old hat about some vague pro-light sentiments. You can tell the light side of the Force is good because Luke...oh wait, he abandoned billions of people to their deaths to sit on a rock. Well, I guess that can be seductive.
(The Planet-Killing Planet thing is also an issue for the goodies in the film. If only The Republic had put their intelligence resources toward tracking the First Order's planet-building expenditures instead of Luke!)
Hey, have I mentioned Princess Jumpsword? She's good at everything! Obviously the daughter of Luke and whatever space-skank he seduced and abandoned. Fans have complained that she's a "Mary Sue" character, unlike say, Luke or Han. I guess she lacks the emotional depth and gritty realism of all the rest of the Star Wars universe, eh eh? She's actually supercute. She has that mannish chin I like on a woman and sounds like Downton Abbey. Princess Jumpsword also saw the Luke map, so Ren kidnaps her and tries to Force (haha, get it) the image out of her but she has magic too so it doesn't work. Then there's a lot of fucking around with the Good Stormtrooper and Han Solo-I mean a lot. Many movies wander a bit in their second acts, but this movie is just over two hours long and for a loooong time there isn't shit happening.
But it's all designed to get Han Solo on a catwalk with Ren and Ren kills him. Because we don't believe for a second that Ren is interested in turning good, of course he kills Han and it's not a surprise and it's not interesting. There is an almost good line where he asks Han, "Help me," and it's clear that he's asking for help with committing to the Dark Side. So that was almost all right. Then Ren has a fight with the Good Stormtrooper, who is black by the way, so of course the black guy loses (but doesn't die, so that's good!) and then he has a fight with Princess Jumpsword, and it's a tie.
Meanwhile, there's some spaceships flying at Precinct 47 to blow up the new Death Star Planet Thing. And they do. And there's some nonsense with shield-dropping and whatnot to get Han and Chewbacca down there first, but the whole thing could have been handled with an empty ship filled with explosives. The new Han Solo type guy comes back for this to do pilot things. It is not exciting or interesting because it doesn't involve any of the dozen closely related people around whom the fate of the galaxy revolves. We've also seen it before in the other films.
Are there good things about The Force Awakens? Sure. I liked the Good Stormtrooper-who has no resources, no friends, nothing at all-wandering the huge landscapes and trying to deal with these cosmic political forces. The idea was exciting. But then he got knocked out pretty easily. I liked Princess Jumpsword. She's a pretty good actor, really. I like that Luke Skywalker doesn't say anything because Mark Hamill is a deeply terrible actor, so that was a moment of good direction. The lightsaber fights were almost okay. Kylo Ren stops a laser blast at one point and it just hangs there for a few minutes and that was cute. Adam Driver has dreamy hair. Harrison Ford has good comic timing. I think Big Evil Gollum (Kylo Ren's new teacher) is pretty neat.
Will I see the next one? It hardly matters, because I saw the first three. Next up, Princess Jumpsword gets her hand chopped off! And for the screenwriters, here are two free lines of dialogue for you to use to help lampshade all the coincidences. Any two characters are fine:
A: Isn't it weird how history repeats?
B: Shut up.
Like any Star Wars film, it makes little sense. I'm not even talking about the inexplicable political economy of the galaxy that has both intelligent robots and people hanging out in tents with dirt floors, or the horrifying reactionary theme of an entire galaxy being held a prisoner of fate by about a dozen closely related individuals. I don't even mean how the Force is supposed to work. Nor how the Republic fell apart so quickly; where the new post-imperial baddies, now called the First Order, get their funding; or why dogfights in space or sending ground troops to blow things up when you have spaceships, or anything like that. I mean basic stuff. Like why does Princess Jumpsword, who has a flying tractor, not park closer to the pawn shop? Why, on a planet full of thieves and scavengers, are spaceships left unlocked, fueled up, and with keys in the ignition? Why is every electrical problem solved by pulling out various wires? (Try it at home-wires tend to only be in place when actually necessary!) Why does everything take so long but happen so quickly? How many flashbacks can one person have? Why is the sibling of a living political figure considered a "myth" by many? "Let me tell you children, about the legend of Billy Carter, a mythical hero who some say wandered off into the beer brewery, never to return..."
Anyway, story. So we have a Good Stormtrooper and Princess Jumpsword and a new droid who has a magic map with which one can find Luke Skywalker, whose Jedi school went tits-up when a student went Columbine on everyone else. Like any proper savior of the universe who learned a lot about maturity and responsibility over the years, Luke...just fucked off after that. You know, I saved the universe, but now I'm sad. Blah blah ancient prophecies I'm sure it'll all work out sorry nine billion dead people laters babes. And that could actually be very compelling character arc for the next episode, but after this movie, I don't have high hopes.
Oh, there's also another guy, who is like the new Han Solo, but he isn't in half the movie. A not-very-loose paraphrase: "I thought you were dead!" "Nah." But mostly it's Good Stormtrooper and Princess Jumpsword.
One big issue is that every dramatic problem in this movie would have been solved had email been invented before FTL propulsion. For whatever reason, there is interplanetary communication and even instant communication between ships and a homebase that are light-years apart, but nobody decides to send the easily agitated baddie Kylo Ren an email with bad news. Instead it's one First Order weaselfuck after another reporting to his office to say "Gosh, we fucked it up again, Coffee-Pot Head" and then he gets angry and uses magic on them. The bad news of course is that Good Stormtrooper and Princess Jumpsword have teamed up to get the Luke map to the Republic and also to the Resistance which certainly isn't the Republic's own regular military but...uh I dunno. There weren't even twenty years of shit novels to explain this.
THE GOOD NEWS is that Kylo Ren has taken a page from the second new Star Trek film and decided that the problem with the Death Star is that it wasn't big enough. So he makes a bigger one, with an ecology (which is actually cool!) and this one works by sucking down "the sun" (not "a star", "the sun") and then spitting it back out at planets it doesn't like. And so Kylo Ren does just that to the planet where the Republic is hiding and the movie is over. No wait, he doesn't do that in the first act because the entire government is...on a secret planet? But that makes no sense! Okay, he doesn't do it in the second act because...he doesn't like genocide? Nah, he ordered a whole village killed four minutes into the movie. But he needs the Luke map! But why does he? Surely, Luke only matters if there's a Republic for him to support and be supported by, right? Even with all his Force powers and shit, he's still just a dude. If Kylo blows up the whole Republic, which he could do at any time because it only takes half an hour to eat the sun and spit it back out at people, he should!
But there COULD BE a reason why! For Kylo Ren is actually Ben Solo(?), the son of Han and Leia. So maybe he has warm feelings for them and doesn't want to blow up his mother? That could have gone a long way to both solve this plot problem and give us a reason to believe that Ren is feeling "seduced" by the light side of the force. Eh, fuck that shit, we'll just have him talk to himself in a room for three seconds to Darth Vader's old hat about some vague pro-light sentiments. You can tell the light side of the Force is good because Luke...oh wait, he abandoned billions of people to their deaths to sit on a rock. Well, I guess that can be seductive.
(The Planet-Killing Planet thing is also an issue for the goodies in the film. If only The Republic had put their intelligence resources toward tracking the First Order's planet-building expenditures instead of Luke!)
Hey, have I mentioned Princess Jumpsword? She's good at everything! Obviously the daughter of Luke and whatever space-skank he seduced and abandoned. Fans have complained that she's a "Mary Sue" character, unlike say, Luke or Han. I guess she lacks the emotional depth and gritty realism of all the rest of the Star Wars universe, eh eh? She's actually supercute. She has that mannish chin I like on a woman and sounds like Downton Abbey. Princess Jumpsword also saw the Luke map, so Ren kidnaps her and tries to Force (haha, get it) the image out of her but she has magic too so it doesn't work. Then there's a lot of fucking around with the Good Stormtrooper and Han Solo-I mean a lot. Many movies wander a bit in their second acts, but this movie is just over two hours long and for a loooong time there isn't shit happening.
But it's all designed to get Han Solo on a catwalk with Ren and Ren kills him. Because we don't believe for a second that Ren is interested in turning good, of course he kills Han and it's not a surprise and it's not interesting. There is an almost good line where he asks Han, "Help me," and it's clear that he's asking for help with committing to the Dark Side. So that was almost all right. Then Ren has a fight with the Good Stormtrooper, who is black by the way, so of course the black guy loses (but doesn't die, so that's good!) and then he has a fight with Princess Jumpsword, and it's a tie.
Meanwhile, there's some spaceships flying at Precinct 47 to blow up the new Death Star Planet Thing. And they do. And there's some nonsense with shield-dropping and whatnot to get Han and Chewbacca down there first, but the whole thing could have been handled with an empty ship filled with explosives. The new Han Solo type guy comes back for this to do pilot things. It is not exciting or interesting because it doesn't involve any of the dozen closely related people around whom the fate of the galaxy revolves. We've also seen it before in the other films.
Are there good things about The Force Awakens? Sure. I liked the Good Stormtrooper-who has no resources, no friends, nothing at all-wandering the huge landscapes and trying to deal with these cosmic political forces. The idea was exciting. But then he got knocked out pretty easily. I liked Princess Jumpsword. She's a pretty good actor, really. I like that Luke Skywalker doesn't say anything because Mark Hamill is a deeply terrible actor, so that was a moment of good direction. The lightsaber fights were almost okay. Kylo Ren stops a laser blast at one point and it just hangs there for a few minutes and that was cute. Adam Driver has dreamy hair. Harrison Ford has good comic timing. I think Big Evil Gollum (Kylo Ren's new teacher) is pretty neat.
Will I see the next one? It hardly matters, because I saw the first three. Next up, Princess Jumpsword gets her hand chopped off! And for the screenwriters, here are two free lines of dialogue for you to use to help lampshade all the coincidences. Any two characters are fine:
A: Isn't it weird how history repeats?
B: Shut up.