“Let me show you something, that will make you feel young, as when the world was new.”
— Carol Marcus, “The Wrath of Khan”
Aging is a motherfucker.
One of my favorite aspects to the Star Trek movie franchise featuring the original cast members was how it dealt with aging. I mean, by necessity it had to, as the series predated the films by over a decade. The actors got older. We couldn’t very well ignore that. These were still our favorite characters, except further weathered by the experiences around them.
(I find this more and more relevant as I, myself, age.)
“Wrath of Khan” in particular did a masterful job of incorporating the theme of aging and wrapping a narrative around it. In that movie, our main protagonist, Captain James T. Kirk, must come to terms with his own physical breakdowns, face the demons (and angels) he’s created in his former life, and ultimately come to grips with death in a very personal way. The lessons are simple and, well, ageless. To wit:
- As we get older, we have to come to terms with how we have been unable to “fix” the world or live our lives in quite the way we might have wanted to.
- We have to see the people we love leave us.
- And we have to endure.
When Disney announced it was making more Star Wars films following its purchase of the property from George Lucas in 2012, thoughts immediately turned to reuniting the “big three” — Harrison Ford, Mark Hamill, and Carrie Fisher — on screen once again. Miraculously, within months it had been confirmed: the fans’ primary wish was coming true. More adventures for Luke Skywalker, Han Solo and Princess Leia were on the way!
Getting our favorites back after thinking it would never happen again (particularly with Ford, who had notoriously been luke-warm at best on his character for years) was a bit like Capt. Kirk cheating death throughout the runtime of “Star Trek II.” It was a thrilling thing to witness.
The downside to this should have been obvious, thanks again to the lessons learned in that previous sci-fi classic. With aging characters, you’re left with things like disappointment and loss as your major themes.
In short, The happy ending of “Return of the Jedi” could not last.
When these movies are planned out, it’s a strange sort of cosmic rhyming that takes us from point A to point B and onward. “If you’re going to do this, well then this other thing needs to happen.” And so forth and so forth until you’re left in a completely logical place … even if the fans didn’t necessarily anticipate (or want) that end point in the first place.
That observation is perhaps better saved for our next installment on “The Last Jedi.” But if we’re getting ahead of ourselves a tad, it should probably be forgiven. No two entries in the Star Wars film universe are as closely tied together as “The Force Awakens” and “The Last Jedi” — from theme to look, to narrative timeline (the movies are separated by mere hours in the canon), to pretty much everything. These movies are intertwined completely. That’s never more clear than when observing our beloved “big three” characters who by now are dealing with the consequences of previous actions (and with their own mortality and legacies).*
* Where Episodes VII and VIII differ most severely is tone, in which the light-hearted “Force Awakens” wants to be a playful, joy-inducing thrill ride (full of patented J.J. Abrams “mystery boxes”) and “Last Jedi” focuses in on themes of desperation, regret and loneliness.
Whether it’s Han or Luke, we’re going to be wallowing in regret, and we’re going to have to like it.
Smartly, “The Force Awakens” deviates away from our “big three” at the start of the adventure and tries to keep things relatively light. There’s no better way to build up anticipation, of course, but it also allows our new characters (and everything else) to breathe. Kylo Ren, Finn and Poe Dameron are all introduced as part of a diaspora of conflict that has bled out of the original Rebellion and Empire. If that’s not particularly well fleshed out, the basics are still clear: these characters’ fates are already invested in this brewing war.
The more central figure of Rey is properly given her own introduction, apart from the others: She must find her own path independent of the other characters.
It’s been said the acting in the sequel trilogy is the best it’s ever been for the Star Wars movies, and I would agree with that. Here, the character of Rey is brought to life in quiet moments very deliberately, while the flurry of activity surrounding the others forces them into quick choices (some of them better than others). These choices — from Finn’s defection from the First Order to Kylo Ren’s grave underestimation of his enemies — define their characters and set the stage for the movie to come. The pacing of all of this is excellent, the action feels authentic, and the humor works too. That Abrams and co. brought in John Williams and many of the original ship and character designs from the original trilogy, it’s no wonder many (most?) fans declared within the first half hour, “This feels like Star Wars again!”
This was clearly no “Attack of the Clones” or “Revenge of the Sith.” It was paying homage to the originals.
It’s right around this time, when our nostalgia has taken firmly hold after our first joy-ride on the Millennium Falcon in roughly thirty years, that we get our first glimpse of Han and Chewbacca, and this sight, so welcome at first, quickly reveals that things can’t stay the same (ironically, a lesson fans should have learned from “The Phantom Menace”).
Most notably, Han has regressed from where we left him at the end of the previous trilogy. He’s gone back to smuggling, adrift apart from the love of his princess, something clearly wrong. Similarly, Leia has retreated into familiar settings, trying to lead a group of resistance fighters against a formidable foe. Soon enough, we learn the true parentage of our villain, and it reveals even more about his parents.
How could the heroes Han and Leia end up raising the new villain of our franchise? And that question calls to the forefront a bigger question that’s been lingering in the back of our minds as well: How could they have let the Empire (or rather, “The First Order”) resurface at all?
The answers are murky, because this movie goes to great pains to avoid any of the politics of the prequels (it goes a little too far in this regard, in my estimation). But suffice it to say, we can say this about Han and Leia (and most of their generation):
They done fucked up.
Fallibility is emblematic of humanity, so that should be a welcome development. For some, “Return of the Jedi” resulted in the happy ending they felt should have retained some measure of permanence. But we wouldn’t have gotten any drama out of that, either. Once you commit to a new trilogy, you’ve got to create important stakes for our heroes.
“A” leads to “B.”
And if the “big three” are still around, that has to mean they failed.
This was all handled in a different way in the previous Star Wars “EU” (“Extended Universe”), though that failure was still present. In an attempt to keep all storytelling options open, the folks in charge at Disney elected to make those books a form of “non-canon.” Many of the fans of the “old” canon were unsatisfied with the “new” canon. Similarly, many fans who hadn’t read all of the supplementary books and so forth still thought of their heroes as more or less perfect. As a result, this re-imagining of the main characters as colossal failures rubbed many people the wrong way.
I chose to look at it this way: Art imitates life. As we age, we make mistakes. Some of those mistakes manifest themselves again in our present. A person facing those demons can be a supremely interesting story to tell.
On the surface, the purpose of this story is the quest for Luke Skywalker, the larger-than-life hero who blew up the Death Star, faced Darth Vader to rescue his friends, and eventually defeated the Emperor. But the mission to find Luke for THIS story is merely a red herring. Luke doesn’t appear until the very end of “The Force Awakens,” and we get no pay-off for what his discovery even means (that will come in the next movie). He’s the reason for the story moving in a particular direction, but he has no role to play. He is the MacGuffin.
Indeed, the film-makers wisely figured out that Luke appearing on-screen would have been problematic for every other character (especially the new ones), as the audience would have been distracted beyond measure by his appearance.
No, the point isn’t the quest for Luke. Instead, the actual purpose of this movie is for resolution between Han and his son, Ben.*
* The hero’s journey of Rey and her actualization as a Force user is, of course, part of the point too. But consider that she’s unconscious/abducted for a big chunk of the third act, and it becomes clear that this is really more about Han and Ben.
Ben/Kylo Ren’s arc to get to this point is compelling. He’s kind of like a Darth Vader working in reverse here, someone trying to cosplay at being a bad guy, and finding the outfit ill-fitting. At the beginning of the movie, he’s big and bad and evil and powerful and a worthy Vader successor. But he gets outwitted and over-powered by Rey repeatedly, leaving him on the bridge, with his father, his master’s command to murder Han Solo weighing on him desperately.
We don’t generally see the big bad humbled quite so thoroughly as this. And it perhaps explains why he goes through with the act of killing his father in the end. He must save face. He must try to appease his master in some small way. But his heart is not in it.
Han faces his demons, and he does so with compassion and love … and he dies for it. This lies in stark contrast to Luke’s confrontation with Palpatine at the end of “Return of the Jedi.” The whole point of the saga to this point has been that war begets war and there’s only one way to break the cycle. “The Force Awakens” suggests at minimum that the day cannot be won without sacrifice, a harsher message to be sure than the one in “Jedi,” but one that is a touch more realistic (experience breeds wisdom, after all).
Another point here, and I don’t want to go on without mentioning it, is that trouble in family relationships has consequence as well. I’m not suggesting Han was an abusive parent so much as I’m saying we can do our best as parents and still get it wrong … and that has ramifications elsewhere. We pass along our mistakes and our problems to the next generation in a broad, global context … but also within our own family dynamic. (Star Wars has always been about big global problems presented in a nuclear family context — it’s part of the reason it resonates so completely.)
There’s more here to admire, of course. I am endlessly fascinated by Kylo Ren’s obsession with Force-sensitive artifacts (like Vader’s helmet and Luke’s lightsaber). It hasn’t been paid off yet, but it feels like a big part of his character. This is a guy looking for a deeper meaning in the world around him. And conversely to what he intoned in this movie’s sequel, those answers (for him) lay in the past. In that way, he’s most assuredly an audience surrogate, the ultimate fanboy of what had previously come before.
Finn is adorable and hilarious and his devotion to Rey is like a warm blanket. Poe provides the swagger our heroes need, while other supporting characters like BB-8 and Chewie all have their moments to shine.
And then there’s Rey.
So confident and assured and downright CAPABLE, she’s a breath of fresh air every time she’s onscreen. The idea behind her parentage being a big mystery is once again a misdirect. You have Ben, the royal (literally) son, boasting training from the best Jedi in the galaxy, descended from “the chosen one,” taken under the wing of the galaxy’s greatest villain (at least at present), essentially given every advantage to succeed. Rey, as she exists here, is his perfect reflection, the nobody, who comes from nothing, who nonetheless chooses to act. She chooses good. Whereas he broods and pouts and even violates her mind, she fights. Because she feels that she must.
Seeing her eventually cut down Kylo is IMMENSELY satisfying.
“The Force Awakens” itself is IMMENSELY satisfying.
Earlier in the movie, when Han first appeared on-screen, he muttered to Chewbacca a gratitude for being back on the Falcon. It was an iconic moment, actually lifted for the trailers, and it captured the feelings of an entire fandom.
We were home again. And while that meant we had to address the present (including all of our favorite characters’ “old people problems”) and embrace our future (in the form of Rey and co.), it was still fun to revel in the past for a couple of hours.
“Chewie, we’re home!”
Indeed.
Liked this post? Check out:
My retrospective on “Revenge of the Sith”
My retrospective on “Attack of the Clones”
My retrospective on “The Phantom Menace”
My retrospective on “Return of the Jedi”
My retrospective on “The Empire Strikes Back”
My retrospective on “Star Wars: A New Hope”