Everyone will have a story for watching this movie.
As for me, it was my two cousins, a month before the premiere of the colossal seventh episode in the series, who invited me to drive an hour and a half and join them for the closest available ten o'clock screening on a Thursday night, with school the next day. I would need to wake up at five o’clock the next morning (having fallen asleep no earlier than two o’clock) to drive the hour and a half back to Lake Forest to make it just in time for my first period class on Friday.
When December 17th had come around, I took a seat in the theater, tired, nearly nodding off as it was already late in the night. I was doubting myself, whether I had made the right choice to limit myself to three hours of sleep before a day of tests and quizzes packed before winter break. But I was having a deeper doubt, one of the movie itself. Almost certainly, the sheer excitement for the latest installment that had been alive and thriving for nearly two years was solely born out of the image of its predecessors. How could the movie be bigger than its audience? I sat in the theater, waiting to see what would become of the story, time and time again thought to be complete, of the old characters and, reluctantly, the new, and of the universe we have familiarized ourselves with as Star Wars.
I would never guess that, in a matter of hours, I would be convinced that I could think of no other way I’d rather witness this spectacle. I need not review the other movies in the saga, but let’s run through them a bit. A New Hope, as many would simply call "Star Wars,” reinvented the hero’s journey, both in its vision of the concrete and the unexplainable. Visually, spiritually, the 1977 movie captivated its audience enough for it to eat up a sequel, The Empire Strikes Back, which near matched the first. A third one was churned out in 1983, not incredible but still good enough to satisfyingly conclude the trilogy, what we now consider to be the “originals.”
Near the turn of the century, George Lucas saw the need to give the franchise’s cult following a much anticipated prequel, then another, then another. Apparently, not so good. I honestly think that there are movies out there that deserve to be panned before these three, but sure, they weren’t the originals.
And how easily we forgot. Clumped together in an awkward jumble of the soulful and, as I’ve liked it put by others, the expository, the prequels were either too dull or the originals were disappointingly unfulfilled. You could still have enjoyed A New Hope on its own. But the other movies were there, and an increasingly exposed youthful generation couldn’t tell the difference between what had rocked the film world decades before and what had been a result of a good director stooping down below his talents as a director, but even more so as a writer, to give fans what they wanted.
That’s what I thought about, as I sat in the theater. Waiting for the screen to speak to me, for me to hear it say that Star Wars would never be the experience it once was.
Suddenly, within its first ten minutes, it’s undeniable that The Force Awakens has something that I haven’t seen since the first Star Wars movie itself: reinvention.
Immediately, everything feels fresh, but grounded. We see everything for the first time, and almost nothing looks familiar. And yet, it’s Star Wars. The air seems to acknowledge that this is new for the filmmakers too, that they have to work for our trust. I couldn’t decide if they were meeting us halfway or doing all the work themselves.
Nowhere in the movie was I lost, confused, detached, or bored. Nowhere was I over-thinking the politics, strategies, mission, or set-up of the situations at hand. I only cared. That’s it. And before I knew it, I loved this movie.
So, basically, The Force Awakens blows the prequels out of the water and gives the lesser of the original trilogy a run for its money.
How? How did we get to not only a seventh movie that is good, but one that is excellent, something near unachievable by any means? You could argue that the credit goes to J.J. Abrams, the new director that brought life into the Star Trek reboots. His rhythm, smooth and precise, is smart. Star Wars has never been filmed this way, and yet, it seems like Abrams’s calling. He makes sure the clean special effects are optimized, not by abusing their quality to produce something numbing across the board but, rather, saving the blistering visuals for the fast-paced parts and calming down with modest images that are comic in their nature but subtle in its vibe alone.
However, I’m going to argue that the thing that makes this movie, in my opinion, a great one is the one thing that blockbusters of the day choose to neglect when it can turn back a strong response: the characters.
That’s all Star Wars really is. That’s why A New Hope was so beloved, and that’s why the prequels fell short. You can’t substitute shiny computer animation for humanity. If we can’t see the latter, then why do we care about this galaxy far far away? Maybe the new one overcompensates for the lost human touch in recent adaptations, but I think that going for broke really did the movie well, or beyond well. A film that means to showcase both the good and evil in the most basic way better do just that. It’s the thesis of The Force Awakens. Even when there’s (conveniently) enough evil to go around, there’s also a well-rounded band of misfits yearning to save the galaxy and make us like them.
I was afraid that this movie would confuse an interesting story with the meatiest conflict it could pull up. What was a relief to me, and what ultimately made this the best Star Wars movie to be released since The Empire Strikes Back, was that it told a story through its heroes, not its villains. It could be a healthy collaboration between a talented direction, a script, a set of actors, and good cinematography that really hits its mark. Or it could be a feeling that transcends any of the film’s individual components and gives us a whole, something that we either have to accept as a whole or deny as a whole. I’m glad we can take it.
Star Wars movies aren’t like others. You can’t really forget about one of them like you can with a Rocky or Jaws sequel. Luckily, the inclusion of this new addition will influence the series for the better, and maybe we won’t forget what Star Wars has offered us and can still.
