Star Wows: Power Gets Up

[Dark Jaguar]

Well I done seen it.

Pretty good. I mean, I'm not a huge War Star fan, but it certainly held my attention, and I actually cared about what was happening. I've got a few minor nitpicks, but it held together pretty well.

[A Black Falcon]

We were thinking of going yesterday, but didn't, yet anyway. Will probably go sometime next week.

[Sacred Jellybean]

Everyone knows the Star Wars series peaked with that confrontation in The Empire Strikes Back (1980) between Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) and the villain, Darth Vader (played on screen by David Prowse, but voiced by James Earl Jones).

The “Luke, I am your father” revelation resonated because it expressed how George Lucas, like his movie-brat peers (Coppola, Bogdanovich, Scorsese, Spielberg, De Palma) struggled with Sixties generational ambivalence. A father–son antagonism resounds through all their films as a reflection of Vietnam-era student protests and the privilege of those draft-dodging filmmaker progeny. Even Lucas, in his escapist outer-space mode, iterated the era’s unease, culminating in Luke’s fear and symbolic castration.

It’s seldom realized that the movie brats’ films are essentially conservative, politically speaking. Yet, in the new millennium, filmgoers’ superficial political awareness makes them nostalgic for Star Wars to maintain the gullibility of their youth. Longing for innocence is all that the insipidness of the latest sequel, The Force Awakens, signifies. When director J. J. Abrams re-stages that primal moment, he does it for brand recognition, but so unimaginatively that it feels hackneyed. Even though it’s meant to be painful for rabid Star Wars fanatics, it lacks mythological significance. Star Wars fans are not required to think metaphorically, so any Oedipal meaning is lost (although there is something of millennial ingratitude in the new filial confrontation), just as the original scene’s impact was ignored in subsequent sequels.

The new characters in The Force Awakens are banal. John Boyega’s black superhero, Finn, updates and restyles Han Solo’s jockish heroism — a cultural evolution that evokes Obama (“I was taken from a family I’ll never know”) for global commercialism. Boyega is appealing-enough to surpass the series’ previous racial tokens, Billy Dee Williams and Samuel L. Jackson, but he is subordinate to the new gallantry of Daisy Ridley’s Rey, who embodies the female empowerment denied to Princess (now General) Leia. Rey “leans in” when she grips the Skywalker light saber, so that feminists can rejoice at the Disney Corporation’s calculated political correctness (although Rey’s competence with weaponry contradicts liberals’ convenient attitudes toward gun control.)

By now we all should know that there’s nothing of adult interest in Star Wars. Even when it premiered back in 1977, the sci-fi premise and comic-book characters were eclipsed artistically by the visionary spirituality of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Yet the continued prominence of Star Wars signifies something that is politically serious, if not dreadful: The great renaissance of American filmmaking during the 1970s and its regeneration of film culture (when movies were seen as a vital means of approaching and understanding contemporary experience) were doomed by Star Wars’ pseudo-imaginative, non-campy rehash of escapist junk. Now, the rebooted, politically empty The Force Awakens suggests a boot stuck in the rear of film culture’s flabby remains.

The Force Awakens is a bread-and-circuses carnival (disguised as “The Rapture,” a young videomaker told me) that is intended to keep millennial audiences docile. Maybe that explains the film’s unavoidable sell and both the media’s and the public’s desperate genuflection. Love of Star Wars is not love of cinema, just consumerist habit. The Star Wars Generation — that unfortunate rabble primed to see these films at the precise moment they were becoming culturally responsive — are not necessarily the audience the movie brats deserved; they’re spawn of Baby Boomer affluence and narcissism. Star Wars turned their natural curiosity and wonder into self-satisfaction, artificially dependent on media and merchandising (a tragedy also evident in Apple and Pixar evangelism).

TV-show runner J. J. Abrams brings his game-changing banality to the Star Wars franchise. He follows the template as originated by Lucas and appeals to adolescent thralldom, keeping the brand recognizable. The Force Awakens is paced better than Star Wars’ other dismal episodes, yet it’s even more impersonal. There’s no visual or spiritual excitement, as there was even in a cynical sci-fi product like Ridley Scott’s Prometheus. Abrams is making product to salute the cultural and economic status quo. With Star Wars, product has not only taken the place of art; it has replaced myth.

[Dark Jaguar]

Oh...
I just thought Star Wars was basic space adventure with no deeper meaning. Now I know Lucas was rebelling against his dad.

But hey, maybe that new guy represents how our generation's parents completely failed to actually prepare us for the world we'd find ourselves in and now we're torn between pretending we're functioning adults and catering to our childhood?

[A Black Falcon]

[Dark Jaguar]

As I've said, I've never really "got" Star Wars as a cultural obsession. I always thought the "orig trig" was an okay set of action movies, but never really saw what made them so special. For me, this is a return to form, in that, as a movie, it was a solid little action flic.

I dunno, I've always preferred Star Trek anyway.

[Sacred Jellybean]

[Dark Jaguar]

I've been had! I'm glad to see you weren't so stuck up about it as whoever wrote that review. I too enjoyed it. As a friend said after I saw it, that particular "moment" in the movie is heavily foreshadowed simply by how closely this hems to the first movie. Not a bad choice, so long as the next two aren't afraid to go their own way.

[A Black Falcon]

[Dark Jaguar]

I'll give you the "we really weren't invested in that star system they blew up" thing. Heck I'll go one better and say the energy of an entire star should have been enough to blow up thousands more planets before needing a recharge.

However, I've gotta say that, even though I saw the "Han Solo is going the way of Obiwan" moment a mile away, it was still effective for me. Think of it this way. What would be the ONE person a rogue who has, in the past, already learned the importance of trusting people would drop his guard for? Yeah, probably his son. I can believe it because of the unique situation it was. I mean, we're not talking about a bunch of people that act like real people to begin with, we're talking about movie people, and they work differently. They tend to form a lot of love triangles that just don't happen in the real world, for example.

Though, at this point, one has to wonder just who ISN'T related to Darth Vader in that universe in one way or another.