Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015)

Star Wars: The Force Awakens (PG-13)

"I've got a bad feeling about this."  - Every Han Solo
"The Force!  Man, that's your answer to everything." - Clerks
"Millennium Falcon?  More like Millennium Pandering." - Me.

Sitting in a darkened theater with a dawning internal awareness that you might be the only one twisting in your seat, uncomfortable with the low-risk plot, the awkward references and dismal acting.  The popcorn is gone, the soda dull, and in your head rings the awful words "It's just an another modern remake, they spent all that time and effort just to remake it, and its a bad counterfeit Picasso, a copy, a fake" while everyone else claps and thanks god for George Lucas' non-involvement.  The trailers were a bill of goods, sold by the aggressively pandering suits at Disney Corp., pap made by a director who's made a career of swerving from expectations, and it's as well made as it is creatively bankrupt, a soulless zombie in an expensive knock-off Armani shambling forever towards higher returns.  At least those terrible prequels TRIED to do something new and failed spectacularly.  Awakens just regurgitates what worked before with a wet, money hungry plop.

Meanwhile Awakens looks like it was wholly constructed in the edit suite, scenes come and go at a breakneck pace just so they happen and not in anyway conductive to the pacing.  A scene will end abruptly, cross wipe to a completely different part of the universe, then back to the first without rhyme or reason except for story reasons the 2nd had to be put somewhere.  It doesn't feel thought out or meticulously planned unlike real SWs, it feels cobbled together good enough, and considering the plot is just "girls and guys with force and cute droids and xwings and star destroyers and deathstars again" there very little excuse for it.  And there are soooo many conveniences of illogic, the new crew just stumbling upon the abandoned Falcon being the most egregious and unnecessary, apparently the Force can and will do that kind of thing now.

So it's a remake, let's treat it as such.  The scope and feel, the "Lawrence of Arabia in Space" tone of Star Wars is completely missing from Awakens.  There are few calm, slow moments of world building here; even the obligatory scene-wipes seem somehow forced and overly fast; you don't inhabit this world only glimpse it.  The only exposition we get is from the fanfictiony text crawl and one very stilted and strangely unemotional conversation between a craggled Han Solo and a stone faced General Leia Organa (who looks for all the world like they tightened her girdle so much she can't move let alone act).  Between her strange head tilting and his half hearted swagger it more resembles the cringey "I love you" scene from CrystalSkull than the one from Empire Strikes Back, instead of a stroke of genius its an actual figurative cinematic stroke.  It's all punctuated by that "it's mysterious because we are keeping you out of the loop" thing that is the oldest of JJ Abrams' tricks, and we need more answers than action.  Why would the Republic be in this ramshackle state, never mind the mention in the opening or the reams of comics Disney has put out, the underdog yet again?  This is a movie, explain it!  And John Williams, where are you?  The only time the music is noticed is when it was once again rehashing the themes from the first trilogy, there is no new piece that stands out and marches around the theater announcing it's greatness.  Then there is all the fan service, the god damned fan service.  Capt. Phasma is a marketing dream and fanboy joke.  The "No look shot" is as bad as Greedo shooting first, and you want your new bad-ass Jedi girl, who can do all these things without training cuz you say so, to inherit the beloved fastest hunk of junk in the galaxy?  Then earn it guys, because otherwise its just another lame fan wish-fulfillment without the politically incorrect metal bikini.  Awakens suffers from the worst case of big budget sequelitis ever seen, literally Jump22's ethos of "People want you to do the same thing, Again. Just a bit bigger.  Same lines, same jokes, same action, everything."

It's not all rehash.  JJ does some new things with the camera (but why god, why keep does he keep using the lens flares, it must be an injoke?).  There are some fun ideas, new uses of the Force that seem a bit questionable, but the reformed Stormtrooper story idea is the best of the bunch (but who's character is involved in countless bumbly spoken word comic relief just enough to ruin it).  He doesn't say "Yeah that's what I'm talking about!" once, but they probably did do a take and it's laying on the cutting room floor after checking TVTropes for relevancy and deciding against running it. Yet some of the attempts of new stuff are as bad as any prequel, Solo's side business is simply just busy work, eating up screen time and adding nothing to the affair but bad jokes and a lot of CG monsters.  There is just enough practical effects thrown in to kill the "curse of the prequels" stink list for the fans, but the rest is all remake-orama, and none of it improves on the original.  The fighter pilots all look wrong, and besides main ace Poe (well played by Oscar Issac, star of Inside Llewyn Davis), the Resistance seems to be staffed by fanboys-and-girls pulled from the ranks of Deviantart who don't yet have drivers licenses let alone a pilot's one.  The bad guy is no Vader, he is a twink with a temper tantrum, the Emperor has been replaced with a pale CGI creature who looks like should be spitting out "GOLLUM GOLLUM".  The Nazi Youth has taken over the Empire from the elder British statesmen because... box office?  Old Men no longer start Star Wars it seems.  The Rebels don't meticulously plan how to blow up the DeathStar 3.0, or send a crack team of top commandos and their entire fleet and barely scrape out a victory.  No, they stand around a readout of the plans point at a spot and say "we blow this up, right?" and then Han Solo winks and says "I got this, you don't wanna know how" because his plan is stupidly self sacrificing; instead of bringing the Army he just flies over to infiltrate the planet with 3 people (2 he just met) and of course saves the day, obviously!  There is no sense of urgency, the big kill-weapon has to charge up for like a day, but the Rebellion is so confident in Han getting the shields down (AGAIN!) that they don't even bother EVACUATING the planet that will eventually be blown up, maybe, "waiting to be killed, waiting to be killed".

In the end big things get exploded good, people hug, and yet it still doesn't end.  The final oddity, the mapquest montage, the overdone out of place LOTR spinning helicopter shot with a stupid nospeak Skywalker cliffhanger, cementing that SWTFA seems more inclined to be the New Harry Potter YA film franchise than a true new Star Wars film in a finite universe.

Star Wars, we meet again, at last. The circle is now complete. When I left you, I was but the learner; now I am the master.

4 Chubby C3P0's Unexplained Self-Referential Red Arms out of 10 (BAD)

PS - Kids will never understand the sweet tension build and release of the 20th Century Fox fanfare, LucasFilm Logo, and sudden burst of StarField and music on the silver screen.  Sad.

PPS - Alternative Title: SW - An Old Hype