In the lead up to and immediately after the release of the
new film in the Star Wars franchise, The Force Awakens, it has been difficult finding genuinely critical
voices willing to assess it honestly. Thoughtful appraisals have been extremely
thin on the ground. Few reviewers, if any, have been willing to say the truth –
that the movie is, compared to the originals, a massive turkey. The official
party line among commentators is that The Force Awakens is some kind of ‘triumphant return to form’ after the
disappointment of the prequels – and woe betide any critic who strays from the
herd. Occasionally, a reviewer may dare to imply that the film has its faults,
that it is, say, too derivative of the original trilogy, but generally, though,
the early reports have been almost exclusively positive. Perhaps no one wants
to offend Disney or jinx the film.
Perhaps no one wants to seem a wet blanket; no one wants to upset the
legions of fans that bought advance tickets by saying that their enthusiasm is
unjustified. The film has Han Solo in it! And Chewbacca and C3P0! Who wants to be the grinch who ruined
Christmas?
A few reviewers have shown the temerity to criticize it. The
Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano,
for instance. The cleric who wrote the piece argued that the evil characters
weren’t evil enough - I must say I have to agree with the Catholics on this
one. Another rare example of a negative review, this time online, is the
critique by Rubin Safaya in Cinemalogue. Safaya focuses mainly on directorial failings and makes a number of
good points; I recommend his review highly. In this post I intend to join
Safaya and go against mass opinion by saying that the film simply doesn’t live
up to expectations. Unlike Safaya I am going to focus mainly on narrative
defects, particularly with respect to genre, rather than directorial mistakes.
I am going to say something perhaps unpopular. I am going to argue that the
film fails to get to the heart of what made the original Star Wars so great in the first place.
I will say one positive thing for the film straight off –
despite a running time of some two hours and twenty-five minutes, when I saw it
the other night, I was never bored. There is always something happening. Theme
park rides are never boring for the same reason. The film is a succession of
action scenes connected by improbable plot developments and allusions to the
original series (often in the form of cameos). Like a roller coaster, the film
has it twists and turns – but a roller coaster is not a story. The film fails
to live up to its classic predecessors. What the film lacks is any sense of depth,
the depth that is the most important aspect
of any fantasy epic. Its narrative flaws are legion. For instance, the film’s protagonists
Finn and Rey just happen to find
the Millennium Falcon on the desert planet Jakku; escaping the planet, they are
picked up by a space trawler that just happens to be piloted by Han Solo and Chewbacca. Just how
big is the galaxy in which Star Wars is set? It must be fairly small. How else
explain such enormous (albeit convenient) coincidences?
One of the defining aspects of virtually all epic fantasies
is the gradual move by the protagonist from a small scale world to a large
scale one. In the original Star Wars,
Luke begins as a simple farm boy on Tatooine with no more than a wistful
yearning to play a larger role in the universe. In The Lord of the
Rings, Frodo starts off as a simple hobbit
living in the Shire with little impulse to take part in the great wars of Elves
and Men. At the start of The Dragonbone Chair (to pick a
random fantasy novel), Simon is a simple kitchen boy. As these stories
progress, the hero’s ‘stature’ gradually increases, the more incrementally the
better, and one way this is dramatized is through revelations that peripheral
characters are secretly more important than they at first seemed. Gandalf is no
mere conjurer, in reality he is an Istari equal in authority to the rulers of
Gondor and Rivindell; old Ben Kinobe is no mere hermit living in a valley, in
reality he is the powerful Jedi master who once taught and fought Darth Vader
himself. Often, and usually towards the end of such epic fantasies, the
protagonist is himself revealed to have a secret identity, one of which he was
himself has been unaware. Simon is really the scion to the throne of all Osten
Ard; Luke is really a Jedi master who must defeat the Empire and redeem the
crimes of his father. The elevation of an ordinary person with whom the
audience can identify to the status of messianic hero is key to most fantasy
epics, from A Wizard of Earthsea to
Harry Potter.
This depiction of two worlds, the big world and the small
world, is essential to any fantasy story. In this department, The Force
Awakens fails miserably. Fantasy fiction
should feel that it is set in a believable consistent universe, a universe with
depth. The new Star Wars film simply gives no sense of a plausible context. An
example… Presumably, after the defeat of the Empire in The Return of
the Jedi, the good guys, having won, have
established the New Republic. What does that make the antagonists in The
Force Awakens? Is the First Order a
terrorist organization like Isis? Does the film describe some kind of civil
war? If the good guys represent the New Republic, does that make the First
Order the new rebellion? The Force Awakens is trying to have it both ways at once – to rehash A New
Hope, in which the heroes were underdogs,
and also to follow on from The
Return of the Jedi in which the Rebellion won–
that is why Leia’s army is rather confusingly called ‘the Resistance’. Are the
good guys in charge of the galaxy or not? Although it is fashionable to bag the
prequels, at least the universe they presented made sense.
The fundamental error JJ Abrams and co made in
conceptualising this film is that they thought they could recapture the magic
of the original films simply by recycling characters, set pieces, visual tropes
and plot devices from the first three films. In fact, they would have been
better served by re-reading The Hero with A Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell. The emotional resonance of the
original Star Wars was based on
its firm foundation in the kinds of stories we find in folklore and mythology.
In a previous post, “The Problem with Robert McKee”, I attacked the idea,
current among many screenwriting teachers, that all stories are types of quest
– I believe McKee wrong in saying that all good films can be considered quests. But some, such as A New
Hope, certainly are. The Force
Awakens, though, never feels remotely
quest-like. For one thing, it has two protagonists. Is Finn the hero, or Rey?
The actors who play both parts are great – I feel I should say this in the
film’s defence. The moment when Finn takes off his white Stormtrooper helmet to
reveal a black face is perhaps the best moment in the film. Yet, to be honest,
neither Finn nor Rey feel at all hero-like – although they both perform
hero-type actions during the course of the film (actions which, arguably, seem
to come to them a little too easily), they both lack some kind of quality, some
desire to make a difference, that real fantasy heroes should possess.
Personally, I would like Finn to have been the protagonist because he seems
like an Everyman in a way the Rey doesn’t, but I didn’t write the film. And it
seems, in fact, from the last scene, that it is Rey who is intended to be the
hero.
The magic of the original would have been better served if
Abrams had stuck more firmly to a quest plot and if he had had courage enough
to invent a genuinely new storyline. The device of a planet-destroying
battle-station used in The Force Awakens has
been employed in the series before, not once but twice – and is used clumsily
here, without any real dramatic impact. The new Death Star, called the
Starkiller, is virtually redundant; the story could quite literally have been
told without it. Does ‘the Resistance’ need a reason to want to vanquish the
First Order? The Starkiller is a kind of MacGuffin. With this difference.
Usually MacGuffins are necessary to advance the plot but, in this film, the
Starkiller occurs only because it was a plot fixture in previous films.
If I had written The Force Awakens, I would have told a quite different story. The idea
that Luke has gone into self-imposed exile is good and I would keep it. It is
an allusion to Obiwan that feels appropriate rather than redundant. The whole
film could have been a quest to find Luke, a journey through space
(encountering obstacles, gatekeepers, etc.) motivated by the fact that the First
Order want to find him first and kill him. The quest would be a race against
the First Order, who, in the film I would have written, would have their place
in the universe more clearly delineated. If the story required additional
motivation for why the good guys need to find Luke, perhaps we could have it
that some child strong in the force might have had a dream that some impending
but as yet unknown threat to the New Republic is going to arise in the near
future and that Luke will needed. Wouldn’t this be an excellent way to set up
the next two films?
See? It took me five minutes to come up with a better
storyline than Abrams and co did. Perhaps they should have devoted a little
more than six weeks to writing the screenplay.
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