Might as well jump in with my biggest problem with The Force Awakens, right? Well, as I watched the movie the first time, and again the second time, and again still the third time, I found myself saying the same two words over and over and over again:
“Wait, what?”
Take it from me, folks: in any kind of storytelling endeavor, be it a movie or a novel or a teevee show or comic book or anything at all, you do not want your audience saying “What, what?” a lot. If you can avoid it at all, great, because every “Wait, what?” constitutes a moment when your audience has left the story and is instead trying to piece together the logic of your tale. “Wait, what?” makes things difficult. “Wait, what?” is a thing to be avoided.
But The Force Awakens is full to overflowing with “Wait, what?” moments, and every single one of them made me crazy, because I do not want to be sitting there watching a Star Wars movie and thinking “Wait, what?” all the time.
The first “Wait, what?” happens in the movie’s opening minutes. We’ve seen the opening crawl, and the ominous sight of a NextGen Star Destroyer crossing in front of a planet. We’ve seen
This is quite the Maguffin, and that is about as much explanation as we get for it. At all. Why does this map exist? Who made it? Why is it a fragment? Almost none of this is explained. Based on the little bits of context the movie provides in two different conversations that come much later in the movie, I am guessing that the map shows the locations of Jedi Temples which are in systems not known on any charts, so without any names, you have no idea what you’re looking at. If you use this fragment with the rest of the map, you can figure out which is the first Jedi Temple, which is where Luke might have said he was going.
This doesn’t really make sense, though, does it? The fragment contains other stars and systems too, so how hard would it be to match the known systems in the fragment map to charts of the known Galaxy, and then use that information to figure out where the uncharted systems are?
This does seem to me to be an interesting call-back to Attack of the Clones, however, because part of that film’s plot hinged on the deletion of a particular star system from the Republic’s maps. Also, while it’s never stated outright, it’s heavily implied in The Empire Strikes Back that Dagobah does not appear on standard charts either. So there is precedent for this, but the movie doesn’t give enough to go on, and what it does give, it gives in throwaway lines that are so quick, you miss them.
More problematic is the old guy. Who the hell is he? What’s he doing with this piece of map? Where did he get it? The film doesn’t answer any of that at all, and frankly...it needs to. It doesn’t have to give the entire backstory of this fellow, but there has to be something. There’s a very old meme in adventure stories, where the old grizzled treasure-hunter shows up with the treasure map and hands it off to Our Hero before dying of the knife in his back or whatever, and that would be OK. This could even be set up with a few lines of dialogue. But instead, the movie implies other things about this guy. He’s got a personal stake here. He is invested. His delivering of this map to Poe Dameron is a moral act, and a few minutes later, when he knows he is doomed, he mouths off to Kylo Ren. Now this fellow is actually interesting, but the movie blows him off, so he’s not a character. He’s a plot convenience.
And now that our
A lot of my problems with The Force Awakens boil down to either “Wait, what?” or “Stop me if you’ve seen this flick before.”
We’re on a desert planet, called
Which brings me to another series of “Wait, what?!” questions. This film’s worldbuilding is awful, and I hate to say that, but it is.
Let’s look back at A New Hope. Everything is explained very clearly and elegantly: there’s a Galactic Empire, and there’s a Rebellion. That’s it. Simple, easy. We know how powerful the Empire is, and we know that the Rebellion is just getting started but is still very fragile. We also know that the Empire hasn’t been around all that long, by virtue of the Emperor having only now been able to get rid of the Senate (a move that is met with skepticism by the Emperor’s own flag officers). In a fairly small amount of dialog and exposition, we learn a lot about the political state of affairs as A New Hope begins.
Contrast that with The Force Awakens, which gives us the First Order which is apparently rising from the ashes of the Empire...but how? How big is it? How strong are they? How big is the Republic and how strong is it? Why is the Resistance seemingly a totally separate thing from the Republic? How is the First Order strong enough to build a weapon that can wipe out the Republic with one shot? What does the loss of Starkiller Station mean to the First Order, and what does the loss of
We know who the “bad guys” are, but that’s not really enough, because no real goals are ever discussed for either the good guys or the bad guys, other than some very Hitler-ian scenery-chewing by General Hux and the requisite “We’re doomed!” from the Resistance, unless they can figure out how to dismantle the Starkiller Station. (That nobody ever raises their hand and says, “Maybe we just go someplace else until we figure out how to destroy it?” is also annoying.)
But back to Jakku, where our friendly important-data-carrying droid is rescued by a local, who then takes the droid on as a companion while she waits for a family that isn’t coming back. Why is she still waiting after all these years (which she has even marked, day-by-day, on her wall)? Who knows. The movie isn’t going to explain that, because JJ Abrams really loves his mysteries and not explaining things. This is not new; it is, in fact, one of his most maddening habits as a storyteller.
Along the way we meet Kylo Ren, who thinks that finding the map to Luke Skywalker (who, for a missing guy, sure seems well-known by everybody) is so important that he has an entire Star Destroyer attached to the job, including General Hux, the military leader of the entire First Order. That strikes me as strange, since in Raiders of the Lost Ark, we don’t have Hitler himself digging in the sands of Tanis. What’s up with that, Lawrence Kasdan? You wrote both films.
The Millennium Falcon is there on Jakku, sitting in a junkyard? Well, OK...we get a quick explanation of this from Han Solo, in which he lists the last four people who have successively stolen the ship. That’s fine, although conceptually...well, it seems to me that the Falcon should be berthed in the Coruscant version of the Smithsonian. But instead, here it is, waiting to be flown by Rey, who hasn’t shown a single hint of being a good pilot until this moment. This isn’t a fatal thing, really; A New Hope commits the same mistake, positing several times that Luke Skywalker is a great pilot, for which we never see any evidence until he straps in to fight the Death Star. So I’ll allow this, but it’s still maddening, because all it takes is a simple exchange:
FINN: How did you know how to fly this ship?
REY: It’s been sitting on that lot for years. I like to sneak in and...pretend.
FINN: Not even pretending could make you fly it that well.
REY: Huh.
Not everything has to be explained, but a little acknowledgment of the mystery goes a long way.
(And for that matter: Does it strike anyone else as odd that Poe Dameron takes this potential traitor stormtrooper at face value? That he doesn’t even question it when this stormtrooper says, “I want you to fly me out of here!”?)
Also note that about this point, our Maguffins change. The map to Luke takes a back seat, and we’re instead trying to figure out where the Resistance base is. Why does the Resistance need a secret, hidden base that the First Order can’t find? Who knows...but A New Hope had that same thing, so we have to have it here, too. Never mind that it made sense in the earlier film.
We meet Han Solo – I’ll have more to say about his reversion post-ROTJ from respected General to “loser who owes lots of people money and can’t get his shit together" later – who gruffly escorts Rey and Finn to
Of course, the only reason for any of this is to bring Maz into the story, so she can serve as Force-mystic. Fine; we have to have a Force-mystic of some sort...but she serves absolutely zero purpose other than to be a Force-mystic. Seriously: the only reason she's in this movie is to jumpstart Rey on her Force-journey. In this five-minute sequence, we cram in all of the first steps in Rey’s Campbellian journey: her Call to Adventure, her Supernatural Aid, her Refusal of the Call. Who is Maz? The film has no interest in telling us. And in what might be the most jaw-dropping of the movie’s “Wait, what?!” moments, we learn that Maz has been keeping Luke’s original lightsaber, the one that was Anakin’s, in a box n her basement. Probably next to her piles of old newspapers and Galactic Geographics.
Look, I really don’t mean to snark here, but...that moment really bothered me, because it had no explanation and no set-up. Last time we saw that lightsaber, it was tumbling into the central reactor shaft on Cloud City after Darth Vader had lopped off Luke’s hand. There must be a hell of a story involved in that lightsaber’s presence in Maz’s basement, but we don’t get it...or even a hint of it. We do get Maz saying basically, “It’s a long story and I don’t have time,” which is...well, look. That sucks. It’s terrible. That lightsaber is one of the iconic artifacts of the Star Wars story, and just sticking it in there with no explanation at all is incredibly lame. It’s a moment that had me wondering if Abrams and Kasdan even cared about the internal logic of their story. To draw a parallel to an earlier Kasdan script, it's as if Indiana Jones shows up in Egypt to look for the Ark, finds the Map Room, despairs of figuring out how to use it, and only then does Marion show up, unintroduced, to hand him the Headpiece to the Staff of Ra and say, "Use this."
This is where we get our first hint that Rey is Force-sensitive, by the way – in the middle of this entire sequence that has no backing from the larger tale.
And worse, now we have not one but two Maguffins in this movie, neither one of which has any kind of explanation that really helps. The “map to Luke Skywalker” gets a little bit of explanation, but it’s split up all over the movie. Han Solo tells us that when Luke vanished, he might have been looking for “the first Jedi Temple” (why? Don’t ask), so maybe the map isn’t so much a map to Luke as it’s a map to what Luke was looking for. A little later on, C-3PO indicates that the locations on the map seem to be uncharted star systems, so it’s a map devoid of context or starting point.
Hey! Maybe there’s a dead knight in that Jedi Temple whose grave is carved with the name of the planet where the map starts! Well, wrong movie, but the whole “two unexplained maguffins” thing feels like if Raiders of the Lost Ark had sent Indiana Jones after “the lost Ark” without telling us what the Ark is, and then halfway through, had the Holy Grail show up.
Now there’s a Godawful sequence in which the
Big Imperial weapon blows up planet as demonstration of its awful might.
Stop me if you’ve seen this movie before.
And the sequence is a partial call-back to something that got a lot of criticism in an earlier Abrams movie, Star Trek 2009, which gave us Spock standing on a planet in another solar system watching as Vulcan got destroyed, as if a planet in another solar system is still close enough to look bigger than Earth’s moon. It was bullshit then, and it’s bullshit in this movie too. Our heroes look on in horror at the sky as the Starkiller (in another star system!) fires its weapon to destroy some other planets (also in another star system!).
Wait, fucking what.
It was nonsense in Star Trek and it’s nonsense here.
Look, no one expects massive amounts of scientific accuracy in a Star Wars movie, but you can’t just rub our noses in it, either. If the Death Star showed up right this second and blew up planets in the Alpha Centauri system, we wouldn’t see a damn thing for four years. I find it hard to believe JJ Abrams didn’t craft this sequence as a specific “Eff you!” to the people who criticized his Star Trek movie.
And now, let’s talk about Starkiller Station. It’s a planet-destroying space station carved out of a planet itself (Wait, what?), that drains energy from its sun (wait, what?) and can apparently fire through hyperspace to destroy planets in other star systems (wait, what?). Does it drain its sun entirely and then it has to relocate? How is the First Order, which is nowhere near as big as the Empire was, able to build something that’s orders of magnitude bigger than either Death Star? And if they can do that...well, I’m reminded of critiques of SPECTRE in the James Bond movies: Why would an organization with enough money to run these schemes (such as carving a rocket station out of a volcano) go to such criminal lengths to make more money, when clearly they could just make all the money in a legit way?
But I digress. Starkiller Station bothered me, and not just on story terms. It’s something of an article of faith among many Star Wars fans that Return of the Jedi is when George Lucas started losing it, when he got greedy and just wanted to make toys, and when he lost all storytelling sense and just gave us another lazy Death Star. I don’t agree with any of these, but they’re real things that you hear a lot in talking about these movies.
A second Death Star in ROTJ? Uncreative laziness. A third one, even bigger, in The Force Awakens? Well now, see, we’ve been hating on Lucas and so we have to love this non-Lucas Star Wars movie, so out come a lot of very goofy arguments like “These stories are based on mythology which is often cyclical so it’s OK to have the same story beats recur.”
My reply? No, it isn’t.
Lucas told three very different stories in the Prequel Trilogy, but he managed then to have Anakin face the same kinds of choices that Luke had to later make, thus casting Anakin’s fall and Luke’s rise against each other. That’s the mythical recurrence, not the constant reliance on Death Stars. But the entire last act of the movie is all about Starkiller Station, and we pretty much stop caring entirely about either of the two Maguffins that dominated the film’s first two acts, the map and the lightsaber.
And how does the Starkiller Station tale come out? Well, we have to identify a weakness in the station’s design. (Stop me if you’ve seen this flick before.) The weakness will make the station unstable and destroy it. (Stop me if you’ve seen this flick before.) But the Station is heavily shielded, so Han Solo will have to spearhead a small mission to deactivate the shields. (Stop me if you’ve seen this flick before.) When that’s done, the X-Wings will have to make a heroic attack run to exploit the weakness. (Stop me if you’ve seen this flick before.) As the battle happens, there will be a countdown until the station can fire on the
I’m sorry, but this entire sequence – which is meant to be the Big Climax – really sucked the wind out of whatever story was left. It goes on too long, it alternates between yuk-yuk laughs and Big Emotional Beats, and worst of all, it contains nothing that we’ve never seen before in a Star Wars movie. I have no idea why Abrams and Kasdan felt the need to do the movie this way, but Ye Gods, you know what would have been awesome? A Star Wars road/quest picture, in which all these people are seeking the clues to the location of the Last Jedi Knight. Instead, that story is set aside and we get yet another SuperDuper SpaceFortress whose destruction is nowhere near as tense as the first two (especially the first one), because there’s no real sense of what they’re trying to do other than “Hit it over and over again with everything you’ve got,” as Poe Dameron tells us at least three times. In the original Death Star sequence, way back in A New Hope, there was a lot of tension because there was a time factor and because someone had to hit a target that was very hard to hit in that short time. Here, the approach is literally, “We’ll just blast it a lot in hopes that we blast it enough in our allotted time to destroy it.”
One scene in this whole sequence really bugged me: the deactivation of the shields themselves. Chewbacca gets the drop on Captain Phasma, and then Han and Finn get her to do their bidding with so little effort that I literally thought of a scene in The Princess Bride at this point. And if you’re trying to make a seriously engrossing adventure space opera epic, you do not want me thinking of The Princess Bride:
YELLIN is pressed against the main gate. WESTLEY, INIGO, and FEZZIK close in.
WESTLEY: Give us the gate key.
YELLIN: (every ounce of honesty he’s got) I have no gate key.
INIGO: Fezzik, tear his arms off.
YELLIN: Oh, you mean this gate key.
Everything ends up OK, though, kinda-sorta. The
Oh yeah, that guy. Who's he? Dunno. Heaven forbid the movie tell us.
I’ve also heard a lot of arguments excusing the incredible lack of exposition in The Force Awakens by appealing to A New Hope, which likewise dropped viewers into a story in medias res, and only filled in details as it went. The big citation here is the single-line mention of “the Clone Wars”, which are never explained until decades and four movies later. Thing is, the Clone Wars are not especially relevant to A New Hope; what matters is that Luke’s father was not a freighter pilot but rather a Jedi Knight who fought in the most recent Big War. The unexplained stuff in The Force Awakens, however, really is important to the story. It matters how Luke’s old lightsaber just shows up out of the blue. It matters why the Millennium Falcon has been sitting in a trash-heap for years, and why Rey can fly it. The Force Awakens is a JJ Abrams story through-and-through: not explaining stuff has been his stock in trade for years. And hey, he’s successful. Doesn’t mean I have to like that aspect of what he does. The only time this habit of his has really worked, in my opinion, is in the Mission: Impossible movie he directed, where the good guys and bad guys spend the entire movie vying for possession of a computer drive or something – and at the very end, when Tom Cruise has saved the day, he says to his boss, “So what’s on this hard drive, anyway?” That worked there, though, in an odd way, given the nature of intelligence communities, where it's often the game that matters more than the object. Here...not so much.
(And gee, how does R2-D2 know exactly when to awaken and cough up the rest of the map? And if he has the map...R2's a machine. Is there no tech-geek in the Resistance who can hack into R2 and get the damn map? The answer to that is, of course, No, and to the prior question, R2 knows when to wake up because that's when the movie needs him to wake up. This is lazy storytelling of the, dare I say it, first order.)
As for Lawrence Kasdan, well – I would accuse him of knowing better, but then, in his most famous and successful script prior to this one, he failed to explain just how Indy knew that looking on the power of the Ark was a bad idea and used units of measurement that imply that Indy is four feet tall.
And you can not tell me that a lot of this stuff is explained elsewhere, like in other novels or comics or roleplaying game background materials or, frankly, anyplace else. The movie is the story I come to see, and the explanatory material for what happens in the movie needs to be in the movie. I shouldn't have to do a research project to understand what's going on in a movie.
I’ll say this in closing for this section: it’s a good thing that JJ Abrams is a very good kinetic director, because even with all its enormous problems in the story arena, it’s still a very entertaining movie to watch.
In the next segment, we’ll discuss issues pertaining to the characters. (The film makes out better on this score, but again, not without some major reservations.)
Part Three: Poe, Rey, Me
7 comments:
There is so little explanation for anything in this movie, I had no idea that the planet destroyed wasn't Courescant. My head continued to swirl around wait, what? This can't BE that planet, right? I mean, we have no idea who any of these other worlds are so it can't be Courescant. But where the hell are we? How is the Republic letting this happen? The Order is actually the resistance this time around, right? (Except its not? WHAT?!) They KNEW that the Order was building this thing... right? Not exactly a small structure on a whole planet as a hidden base. Their base/weapon WAS the planet.
The story was just sloppy. It was. I was entertained with it far more than Episode 2, which I found utterly unwatchable more than once, but at least the prequels had a flow and logic in the storyline. This had none of that. Yeah, I found some things annoying in Ep. 1 & 3 but I simply can't think about Ep. 7 at all without making my head hurt...
Oh and the only thing Poe was missing was a literal sparkle come from his teeth when he hopped out of his X-wing for the first time to be a standard hero Gundam pilot. Just saying.
Tayna: Agreed on most points, except for your evaluation of Episode II! That movie does seem to be the most polarizing of the Prequels, for some reason (I'm guessing it's the not-quite-done-right romance aspect of the thing).
You cover pretty much all of my issues with TFA, which are too enormous for me to offset with the positive stuff. The more I've thought about it, the more I've decided it's actually the shitty movie everybody has spent years claiming the prequels were, and there are exactly two reasons why it's so bad:
1. The makers were soooooo determined to erase the prequels and "recapture the feel" of the original trilogy that they were willing to abandon logic, e.g., we need rebels vs. Empire, so we get Resistance vs. First Order. How does that work? Who cares, it's kewl!
2. JJ Abrams. Seriously, why do people praise this hack? He's a sloppy storyteller who covers up his shortcomings with all that blather about mysteries. The macguffin in TFA isn't a mystery, it's a gaping plot hole. Anakin/Luke's lightsaber? Gaping plot hole, but I'll have somebody make a cute quip about how there isn't time to explain and everyone will buy it. The truth is, we don't get these answers because JJ doesn't have them. And moreoever, he doesn't frickin' CARE. He relies on the speed of pacing, slamming us from one action set piece (which I'll grudgingly admit he's pretty good at) to another to keep us distracted from asking questions. ARG. The man has single-handedly brought down two of the franchises that shaped my entire imagination. If the word goes out that he has anything to do with Indy V (which I'm already dubious of), I think I'll scream.
Kelly: It was the romance aspect of Ep. 2 that really got to me. It felt forced, there seemed to be zero chemistry between Padme and Anakin (which oddly was gone by Ep. 3 when they seemed comfortable with one another) and the whole attempted assassination of Padme was just terrible. It felt like an excuse to get two Jedi guards (Anakin and Obi-Wan) to hang out with her. Anni was a giant whiner until exciting things happened and Obi-Wan suddenly having an issue with flying were things that made my eyes roll.
Anyway, back to 7. You're not the only one who saw The Princess Bride. I have a feeling that scene was SUPPOSE to invoke it. It's been an ongoing theme in movie making to toss in pop references that your audience will get. It works in certain films, like Guardians of the Galaxy but it made sense for our would be hero to make quips like those. It wouldn't surprise me if a starship design or two was plucked from Trek or GotG if you look closely enough.
Honestly, I wish it WERE more Firefly and less fairy tale, because that's what it feels like. In fairy tales you don't ask questions about how birds talk and bears have cottages. They just do. Star Wars begins exactly how a fairy tale would start 'Long Ago in a Galaxy Far, Far Away...". Fairy tales is what Disney does. It's really all it has ever done well over the decades and that's what they want Star Wars for. When you think about it, purchasing Lucasarts wasn't much of a stretch. Ep. 7 was the start of Princess Rey's story. She'll be in a glittery gown and crown/headpiece at some point and look very uncomfortable with it, just you wait.
Tayna: I don't think there's NO chemistry; I think there's some, but there could be more...but there shouldn't be TOO much, because that relationship HAS to be one-sided. The romance stuff didn't bother me all that much, except for the fireplace scene, which should have been handled MUCH differently (see my Fixing The Prequels posts for details!). And I like the assassination attempt; that makes sense, and in fact, I think there should have been another one later on. (Again, see Fixing the Prequels for details!)
STAR WARS wasn't fairy tale at first; it was myth. But it does seem to be shaping in the direction of fairy tale. I like fairy tales just fine, but this shouldn't be one.
BTW, did you ever notice that all of Quill's quips in GOTG are taken from the years he was on Earth? He's not up with anything recent, so he quotes nothing recent! I love that. Good thought put into the script, there -- such as calling Rocket "Ranger Rick". I love smart writing!
I'm pretty much with you on all points here. The only exception is the "things which are not explained" bit. I'm OK with being left in want of more information as long as that information promises to be forthcoming. Clearly Rey's identity, and Snoke's, and probably Maz' will be explained in upcoming films, and I'm OK with that. As for why Maz has the lightsaber, I suspect the answer to that is because J.J. started with the final scene of the movie already in his head, regardless of whatever story was necessary to get to that point, and had to get the lightsaber into Rey's hand somehow.
"Oh yeah, that guy. Who's he? Dunno. Heaven forbid the movie tell us."
Your points are well taken, but this entire entry was just hilarious. I laughed until I cried.
The guy who played General Hux, Domhnall Gleason (as well as Oscar Isaac, unrecognizable in a full beard), was in a creepy little indie sci-fi movie, Ex Machina, that came out last year. I don't know if you've ever seen it, but I rather wish Alec Garland (the writer and director of Ex Machina) had taken the reins of The Force Awakens.
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