Star Wars: The Force Awakens (4/5 Stars)

It looks like I won’t be skipping my annual ritual (Godzilla, Abysmal State of Movie Ratings, The Avengers, War Horse) of discussing the idiocy of movie ratings and how they affect onscreen violence. I saw this movie in December so this review counts for 2015.

But first of all, the movie does not suck. It is not great and in a smart and safe way does not particularly try to be. That is all right by me. I felt it put the franchise on solid footing and that (many more) future installments will have the room to be more creative and daring if they feel like it.

The movie looks great in the way it should look great. That is to say that it is has all the best cameras and digital effects of today but stays true to many of the technological tropes of the 1970s that distinguished the original Star Wars films. When characters walk into a bar, the aliens are not digital creations. Like the Mos Eisley Tavern in the original they are composed of real life frabric and costuming. And the 1970s clunky computer graphics that everybody uses in the movie are seamlessly transmitted into a 21^st century blockbuster. It is actually much better than I thought was possible. The movie looks great in the correct way. Good job team J.J. Abrams.

The movie introduces two new lead characters and is so good at doing it that the 30-year gap between movies may turn out to be a blessing year in disguise. The first is Rey (played by Daisy Ridley), a poor orphan on the outpost planet of Jakku. She is a stoic scavenger that hunts for parts in the nearby crash-landed and abandoned Imperial Star Destoyer. The second is Finn (played by John Boyega) a stormtrooper who deserts his post after witnessing the brutality of the Imperial system. On his first mission he is told to kill innocent villagers and chooses not to follow orders. Knowing he will be severely punished for not toeing the line, he rekidnaps the newly captured Rebel pilot, Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac) to help him escape away.

Rey and Finn are respectively a woman and a black guy. The movie has determined to include everybody. As a white guy I am going to have to be content with Oscar Isaac, who is awesome and I am content with him. Thankfully the movie does not seem to particularly care about Finn being black. However it does insist on several jokes about Rey being a strong woman. These aren’t bad as much as I’ve already heard them before. My favorite though has to be when Rey and Finn are being chased and an explosion near Finn knocks him out. He wakes up and asks Rey, who is standing over him, if she is all right.

 The rest of the new people are a casting director’s dream of interesting people. Adam Driver (of all people) is the new Sith Lord, Kylo Ren. He is a bit of pretty boy and that is one of the relatively more daring twists in this installment. It works by the way. Kylo’s evil counterpart, General Hux, is played by Domhnall Gleeson. Domhnall is my 2015 nominee for Best Year (Ex Machina, Brooklyn, The Force Awakens, The Revenant). Then there is Lupita Nyongo (12 Years a Slave) and Gwendoline Christie (Game of Thrones) who provide voices for their respective characters. None of these actors are all that famous but if you consistently watch good movies, you know of them, because they have distinct voices and memorable faces. They are not a marketing executive’s generalized lowest common denominator pick of what would appeal to most people at the same time (like say the many superheros played by Chris). Nobody in this movie is like that (well maybe Daisy Ridley if we can safely say that being a woman is no longer a handicap anymore). That is kind of amazing in and of itself and makes the movie (and any future installments) that much more interesting to watch.  

Past castmembers are also back but in supporting roles. Luke Skywalker’s absence is a major plot point. I suspect Mark Hamill will have a much larger role in the next movies. Princess Leia is now General Leia and she too has not so big a part though I suspect she may have a larger part in a future movie as well. (There was some controversy over how Carrie Fisher looks. It is not that she has not aged well. It is that she has had enough work done on her face that she no longer looks like a natural aged progression of Princess Leia. It would not have been a big deal if she had wrinkles. She’s old. She should have wrinkles. It is worth noting this in a review because her appearance is unnatural enough to be distracting.) Of the original cast members this movie belongs to Han Solo (and Chewbacca).

Han Solo’s presence and in particular his cool/frustrated dynamic with the always over his head but optimistic anyway Finn provides much of the movie’s fun. There is a good deal of it and provided many of my favorite parts. At one point several of Han Solo’s aggrieved trade partners come after the smuggler and Finn in an effort to save Solo accidentally releases his cargo of extremely dangerous alien predators. And now everyone might die. That was a hoot.

Also rather fun and the defining characteristic of the Star Wars franchise is the aggrandizement of the individual. Other movies are content enough with having the guy next door achieve superpowers, go on an adventure, and save the day/win the hot girl. In Star Wars, all this happens but on a galactic scale! That is to say instead of just competing with several billion people on Earth for the mantle of most special, the characters in Star Wars are supposedly contending with trillions. And the major players in this extraordinarily multidinous amount of life are somehow related by blood. The scope of Star Wars very very big and the people who actually matter are very very few. Try not to think about it too much or the whole thing may seem rather silly. Just enjoy it like when characters somehow infiltrate a gigantic base and somehow know where everything is and somehow never get caught or seen by the many patrols. It’s like when you were five and you played war games or hide and seek except this is with a budget of several hundred million dollars.

Having said that there was something that really nagged me while watching this movie. Take Finn’s story. The fact that he is a disgraced stormtrooper has the effect of humanizing the storm troopers. But, that does not stop him (or anyone else) from killing a lot of stormtroopers in this movie with very little hesitation. And that is just the death you see outright. This movie destroys planets. Not a planet like the original Star Wars. The mean General Hux destroys five planets with his Planet Death Star thingy. That is an extraordinary amount of death right? I mean that is like tens of billions of people. But what is the reaction to this? In the first Star Wars, Ben Kenobi felt a tremor in the force and had to sit down or whatever. In this movie, there does not seem to be any grieving period at all. The planets are not named, no main characters die, and so it is not that big of a deal. As far as I can tell J.J. Abrams with his penchant for destroying entire planets (he has done so before, see Star Trek) must have officially surpassed Roland Emmerich for the motion picture director with the most blood on his hands.

And all of this in a PG-13 movie. How can tens of billions of people die in a movie and it retain its PG-13 status? Counterintuitively the reason it can is because nobody cares about these people. The deaths happen out in the distance of space to nameless people we do not know who have no connection to the people in the story we do know. This is counterintuitive because movie ratings are supposedly about morality and it is pretty universal in all systems of morals that human life is important and equivalent to all other human life. But this is not how it is in movies. In Star Wars: The Force Awakens, we are prompted to care far more about the death of a main character than we are for the tens of billions of people who have died during the course of the film. And anybody who has a mask or helmet on? Thier life isn’t worth shit and their untimely deaths at various times are occasions for laughs or thrills. The MPAA gives a movie an R rating on the basis of blood not death or injury. But what is the ultimate effect of this? Basically any death that isn’t taken seriously (because all violent death requires blood) is okay to show to children. But should children not be aware that violence causes men to suffer and bleed? Should they be told that if they don’t see a person’s face than that person’s death is trivial? And if a person or very many people died in some far off place, should it be related as no big deal?

Such are the idiocies of the present policy and whatever it’s supposed ambitions to promote morality are, I argue that they do the opposite. And I expect I will make the same argument again sometime in the next year.