SPOILER FREE. TRUST ME: Until now, there’s only been one good movie in the Star Wars canon. No, don’t argue with me. That movie wasn’t Star Wars itself but The Empire Strikes Back and while it has only grown in reputation in the 35 years since it was released (and the first movie at least remains a turning point in the history of modern science fiction cinema even if it wasn’t quite as good as its reputation suggests), Empire was the peak of the Star Wars experience and perhaps the peak of George Lucas’s career. It was also the film that prevented Lucas’s original box-office smash from becoming a one-hit wonder.
Not your father’s Stars Wars. Not really George Lucas’s, either.
All of that seems like ancient history now, yet I can still remember the excitement I felt watching The Empire Strikes Back on its opening night in 1980, somehow transforming itself from a postmodern Saturday morning serial into something darker, more resonant, more adult. It promised great things to come. Frankly, I had been a little disappointed in the first film, maybe because it had been praised just a little too lavishly by my friends and my expectations had gone through the roof. After Empire, though, I realized that the stars weren’t the limit for these wars. Lucas had already announced plans to make a nine-film series and they were just going to get better and better.
Only they didn’t.
Return of the Jedi, the third film in order of production, was a bland if slickly produced mediocrity with high-budget special effects, a cast of comically demented Muppets, and aliens who looked suspiciously like plush Christmas toys. There was very little of the adult darkness that had permeated Empire. After my hopes had been wildly raised by the second film, they were dashed by this perfunctory resolution to Lucas’s ostensibly mythic arc.
Yet there was still hope: Maybe the prequels, which Lucas was already planning, would be better.
Okay, stop laughing.
The prequels are now history and should remain so, but we now have something that could and should prove far, far better: the sequels. Hollywood media factory extraordinaire J.J. Abrams, who would have been ten years old when the first movie came out on May 25, 1977, may understand the appeal of the Star Wars franchise better than its creator did. While there may be a few points at which Star Wars VII: The Force Awakens falters, Abrams gets so much right that I can’t imagine any but the most churlish fans of the original films complaining that the Walt Disney Corporation has purchased the keys to the Millennium Falcon from Lucas and handed them over to the wrong person. Abrams is perhaps the one person on earth best qualified to make the light speed jump that Lucas failed to make into the 21st Century.
What does Abrams get right? Very many things. Great special effects? Check. Nicely paced action scenes alternating with slower character moments? Check. But Lucas would have gotten those right too. Here are some thing Lucas might have fumbled: Abrams brings back every significant member of the original cast, right down to Peter Mayhew as Chewbacca, Han Solo’s furry copilot on the Millennium Falcon. He gives us two wonderful new cast members, John Boyega and Daisy Ridley, as a reformed stormtrooper and a starship pilot turned scavenger, respectively — and anybody who doesn’t love their characters by the end of the movie lacks heart, soul and eyeballs. And he also gives us a Darth Vaderish villain in Adam Driver’s Kylo Ren.
From top to bottom: John Boyega, Daisy Ridley and Adam Driver looking a lot like Darth Vader
As if that weren’t enough, Abrams had the wit to bring back masterful screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan to work on the script. But most of all he found the darkness that Lucas left behind in Empire and failed to restore in Revenge of the Sith, though you can see him trying, at least, in that last one. The darkness in the The Force Awakens — and, yes, the humor too — prevent it from being just another science fiction action film (and may explain why it wasn’t released as a summer blockbuster) and kick it up into a much higher cinematic orbit.
I can’t tell you much more than that because it would all be spoilers, especially this soon after the movie’s release. Let’s just say that things happen that have deep emotional resonance and that when the final credits appear you don’t want the movie to end: You want to know what happens next. And not because someone’s life is in peril but because there are relationships being formed and revisited that leave tears in your eyes, a smile on your lips and a powerful urge to buy advance tickets for Episode VIII. ( You should get them at the theater where we went, which has reclining seats, stadium seating and surprisingly cheap tickets. No, I won’t tell you where it is.)
If you haven’t seen this one yet, go. It’ll be in theaters for a little while, but see it before the spoilers burst out into your Facebook feed — or from the mouths and text messages of your friends. And see it while you can see it on a huge screen — yes, bigger than that wall-mounted flat-screen baby in your den.
Or just see it so that J.J. Abrams can get even richer than he already is. He’s earned it.
Adrift in the Infosphere 