The Force Awakens with ADHD (Spoilers)

There's a scene in Rocky where Sylvester Stallone's titular character wanders around the huge venue of an arena on the eve of the big fight.  There is minimal dialogue, and after Rocky goes home, he talks to Adrian about his lack of confidence and his doubts in facing the champion, Apollo Creed.

The scenes are introspective, devoid of any dramatic musical stab to accentuate to the audience that this should be considered important, thought-provoking shit -- just in case the audience happened to be comprised of unfocused, inattentive dullards.  Because there's nudging them along and then there's yanking them from room to room, and director John G. Avildsen knew the difference as he helmed the 1976 Oscar-winning treatment of Stallone's original script.



Captain Phasma, we hardly knew ye (source: Richard Eriksson, Wikimedia Commons CC:BY:2.0)

That's probably my biggest problem with The Force Awakens.  It's this hyperactive kid who won't sit still or shut up long enough to let you enjoy the scenery.  And the audience gets thrown into a roller-coaster ride that has bumps along the way, reminding them that the track was hastily built.

I saw Star Wars when I was just seven years old and it blew my imagination away.  In later interpretations it was described -- and derided -- as space opera, and while the father of that subgenre, Jack Williamson, did not live to see this latest film, the entire phenomenon is both loved and hated for the indelible mark it has left across generations of fans.  I'm one of those fans who grew up and had kids of their own, and it was great for all of us to go to the midnight release and see new life breathed into the franchise.

But my generation also grew up in a crazy arc of narrative maturity, from the campy but beautifully photographed Raiders of the Lost Ark to the raw, immersive brutality of Reservoir Dogs and the gritty comic-book realism of Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy.  We watched as an entire era of VHS and DVD rentals at Blockbuster came and went out the door on Chapter 11 filings.  Star Wars was a movie from a different, simpler, and hokier time; even the late Sir Alec Guinness -- Obi-Wan Kenobi himself -- lamented once in an interview with David Letterman that he "didn't think much of the dialogue."

So this new entry into the Star Wars canon arrives in an era of the jaded mindset, of lightning-quick reviews in social media dismissive of maudlin acting and eschewing contrived settings, of every nuance and line of dialogue distilled and examined by novice and professional alike.  It carries the burdensome weight of expectant vindication after most people agreed George Lucas nearly banished the whole thing to late-night talk-show punchline fodder with the execrable second trilogy (The Phantom Menace; Attack of the Clones; Revenge of the Sith).  So how did it do in the hands of director J. J. Abrams, the one who had already successfully relaunched the Star Trek franchise a few years ago?

It's not without its problems.  Abrams seemed to have been pressed for time to develop backstory, to allow the audience to invest emotionally in many of the newly introduced characters.  After establishing the dry and severe locale where Daisy Ridley's character, Rey, has been marooned for nearly all of her young life, the film suddenly catapults into a dizzying quick-cut of scene after scene at breakneck speed.  Likewise, there is no time for long-time fans to truly savor the return of legacy characters like Han Solo, Chewbacca, General Leia Organa, and so forth.  This is a movie with a checklist agenda to deliver certain elements in the correct firing sequence, and it accomplishes this successfully, for the most part.  But it could have been better.

First, to the critique of characters.  John Boyega's character of Finn, the reluctant stormtrooper-gone-rogue, is too much of a confused cipher to project into our minds as a believable anti-hero.  From the melodramatic opening shot of him seeing a comrade (possibly a lover) die in his arms, to the scenes set on the planet Jakku and Starkiller Base where he alternately tries to cajole, sneak, barter and fight his way to his immediate goals with comic effect, his overall game is tonally inconsistent.  Boyega seemed to be at home delivering comic relief, but I felt the role demanded more gravitas and less Benny Hill.

Nowhere was the contrast in Boyega's vacillating portrayal felt most as when it was interlaced in his scenes with Daisy Ridley, whose delivery was pitch-perfect as Rey: lost, struggling to survive, seasoned in open-desert wiles but interminably hopeful in her ill-fated desperation to reunite with the parents who marooned her in that backwater junk yard of a planet.  Every action and reaction in Ridley's portrayal was nuanced and fitting; every outrage buttressed by an equal mix of anger and fear, the very emotions from which she is expected to veer away if she is to embrace the light side of the Force.  In her honest presentation alone, this next movie trilogy's breakout story holds the most promise.

A close second in the line of good impressions is the ace rebel pilot Poe Dameron played by Oscar Isaac, who doesn't try to be funny and gives the audience a swashbuckler ready with the wisecracking quips in a manner reminiscent of another pilot-smuggler.  Though his screen time is limited, Isaac's character makes the most of it; from the opening gambit of espionage to the too-familiar oh-no-I'm-strapped-into-an-examining-table-and-getting tortured scene, Dameron would have been a much better choice as Rey's partner in rebellion than Finn's Jerry Lewis schtick.



Star Wars Celebration in Anaheim (Source: William Tung via Wikimedia Commons: CC:BY:2.0)

And we come to the character of Kylo Ren as portrayed by Adam Driver.  Poor, misunderstood, whiny Kylo Ren.  In this matter alone, I could say I felt cheated by the movie's marketing campaign -- just as I felt cheated that Captain Phasma, for much of the hyped-up promotions, enters and exits with remarkably little fanfare and absolutely nothing notable in driving the plot -- but the truth is that a budding villain doesn't need to evoke ultimate badassery to be effective.  Especially when dealing with emerging villainy, what a credible antagonist does need are equally believable and sympathetic flaws so that the audience can be carried along in abject horror as we see how each bad decision takes them one level closer to more sinister evil.

Kylo even gets talked down to by punk Imperial officers (a very effective Domnhall Gleeson as General Hux, delivering speeches with a Hitler-like insanity).  And when he can't Jedi-mind-trick his way into Rey's thoughts, Kylo runs up and snivels and whines to this giant Lemony Snicket hologram with the laughable name of Snokes.  In what was probably intended to be a climactic battle that feels more like a disappointment, Kylo quite nearly gets his ass kicked twice: first by no other than that stooge Finn and then by Rey, who summons her inner Jedi in a matter of seconds and nearly vanquishes Kylo.  So this is the heir apparent to Darth Vader?

But here, chiefly, I blame the script and its failed tip of the hat to the legacy characters we knew from before.  There was no backstory to how Ben Solo traversed to the dark side, how incomplete his transformation may have been, or how unprepared he was for battle.  Was General Organa too busy running a fledgling New Republic to raise her own son?  Was Han Solo too preoccupied with whatever the hell he was doing to pay attention to giving little Ben a proper upbringing?  Did they notice Ben's orientation to the Force early on and argue about whether or not to encourage it?  Had an unknown, stronger dark force already taken root in young Ben by the time Uncle Luke and his Jedi academy came into the picture?  So many opportunities for dramatic development were wasted here.

Even the implied upbringing that we are left to infer from the scant few referential asides of dialogue leave us with a dubious taste in our mouths.  Han Solo was a bad father?  After seeing how loyally and respectfully he treated his Wookiee best friend, Chewbacca?  Leia Organa was a mom who let Ben run off to join some dark-side goth kids on the emo side of the solar system?  This woman, who loved Han Solo so much she risked her own life to break him out of Jabba the Hutt's fortress-lair on Tatooine, just let her own flesh and blood break bad?  Little of this made sense in light of the film's history except to give the story the inertia it needed to check off the next box.

Granted, to fully explore how Ben grew up and got his head all cross-wired the way it was might have taken up a whole other movie.  Still, some foreshadowing of this could have been worked into the film to deepen the meaning behind key moments of drama.  As a result, the most pivotal scene of the film -- Han Solo dying by his own son's hand -- is robbed of the emotional impact it must have been intended to have.  In fact, the return of nearly all of the old faces is marred by an overall sense of being rushed to the next plot point, and it left me feeling that Abrams included them merely as audience-drivers in a movie where he didn't really want them in the first place.  There just isn't any other way to explain their almost dismissive appearances.

Yet if he treated the legacy characters rather poorly and the new characters inconsistently, Abrams was certainly not shy about borrowing story elements in a very modernist reversal-of-fortune arrangement.  Another kid fending for herself in the desert; another, bigger Death Star; another covert operation into a ridiculously-easy-to-break-into New Order venue.  I have to wonder what the next big thing to blow up is going to be in the sequel, and just how poorly designed must be the security systems if they allow a rebel force to land on a planet and known deserters to openly walk through corridors undetected.

One thing should be noted about the story creator, George Lucas, before we toss another tomato in his general direction: he is and always will be a visionary.  Another astute observer actually commented on the imagined worlds he introduced to us in that second trilogy, which had set designers working overtime to take us to new locales and inspired set-pieces.  The story and pacing might have sucked, but the characters were memorable.  We are still talking about Darth Maul, Jango Fett and God help us, Jar Jar Binks.

And sure, you could argue that Abrams was under a lot of pressure to deliver many feats on warring fronts: reward those first fans from 1977 who waited so patiently for the return of Luke, Leia, Han and gang; grant a cathartic release from the psychic pain inflicted upon the children of those first fans with the calumny that was George Lucas's second trilogy; and ushering in the mother of all money-makers to Abrams' new Hollywood paymasters at Disney.  But he's an experienced director who knew these would be choppy seas to sail; if he didn't think he was up to the task, he shouldn't have overpromised.

The real first order (source unknown; I suspect the Internet)

Judging from the sound of box-office records being shattered as I wrote this, Abrams succeeded in the last category.  Maybe that's the only one that really mattered; but more was owed to the legion of fans who wanted to see their favorite characters return with some sense of fealty.  Leia deserved more screen time than just a series of melodramatic scowls and grimaces; Chewie deserved a compelling backstory instead of the continued one-dimensional man Friday; and Han deserved a much better death than the metaphorical and literal act of being pushed off a cliff like some third-tier stock character.  Luke Skywalker himself, for all the prominence of his mentioning, makes what is essentially a non-speaking cameo in this film just based on the screen time.

So bottom line, it was great to see the old characters return, but no, I didn't like the story all that much.  The sequel will reportedly be directed by someone other than J.J. Abrams.  Let's see what changes this way come.