“Piloting, shooting, and self-teaching are the interactions through which the social network of the story operates. And just as the movie spins off bits of itself for marketing, it also takes fairly seriously the question of exchanges within the network of its young stars. When Kylo captures Poe, the pilot smart-mouths him: “Do I talk first or you talk first? I talk first?” (Good guys ask; bad guys insist: they are the First Order.) Slick interactions are the movie’s strong suit. In one bravura shot during the Battle on Takodana, the camera executes a complex left-to-right track and pan, shifting its attention from Finn on the ground to Poe in his X-wing back to Finn back to Poe. Finn punctuates the moment by proclaiming “That’s one hell of a pilot!” He is, or isn’t, talking about the cinematographer.”
“In short, The Force Awakens is tighter than it has been given credit for. The problem — the problem that most reviewers have had with it, the problem that its defenders have had to shunt aside — is that the resonances with earlier versions are far too strong.”
“As a result, criticisms — or defenses — of Star Wars’s narrative retreading are misguided, not because the film is narratively innovative, but because critics continue to regard it as far more immune to the broad tendencies in big-budget Hollywood filmmaking than it is now or ever was.”
“The first film was undeniably the project of an auteur, a director who got what he wanted formally, while simultaneously launching a new era of merchandise by out-negotiating 20th Century Fox. Lucas was a 1970s figure with aspirations of the same order as his mentor, Francis Ford Coppola, but unlike Coppola, Lucas actually managed to turn himself into a new-era studio. At the heart of that new studio were sound (Sprocket Systems, now Skywalker Sound) and large-scale special effects (Industrial Light & Magic).”
“The decision to set the initial Star Wars films in a grungy, lived-in universe remains brilliant. However digital that world had become, there was still a necessary materiality to the place, and it was still spitting out garbage. R2-D2 is always jacking into various computer ports — there is Force but no wi-fi here. That analog insistence extends to the films themselves. They were technical marvels but they were basically analog marvels overseen by a man who had more of a sense of what digital cinema might promise than anyone else.”
“3PO cannot give his audience a perfect digital copy, but that isn’t the point. The point is that the storytelling here draws on a uniquely recognizable sound library via an instant, nonlinear retrieval system. The translator’s utopia has as its complement a utopia of storage and recall. That utopia, not unimaginative nostalgia, underpins The Force Awakens.”
“Alongside sound, what made the first Star Wars compelling was a mastery of on-screen scale, a particular parallax of human-sized motions against things geological, or galactic. That’s the other half of why the opening shot of the star destroyer worked, and it’s why the very long shot of Luke’s speeder zipping left to right is so memorable.”
“She is our scalar emissary, dropping into the destroyer’s vast abandoned hulk, fishing for tradable spare parts, more completely alone than Luke was (of course she is orphaned).”
“Scalar replication brings us back to the initial problem: that The Force Awakens is, for its detractors, a 1:1 scale model of A New Hope. It seems to clone Episode IV, with a (self-consciously) cruddy climactic space battle and a limited number of quasi-mathematical transformations operating to cross up the gender and ethnic makeup of the major characters.”
“The worst defense of this sort of repetition is the invocation of myth; the second worst is Lucas’s own invocation of poetry.”
“ut despite decades of follow-on Joseph Campbell–derived screenwriting, the initial installments didn’t work because they were driven by some eternal masterplot. At the level of plot, Star Wars was acceptable not because it made sense but because its components were fungible. Like the 1930s serial space operas it emulated, Star Wars delivered, regularly, and then moved on.”
“Instead of simulating a temporal zone of action, many of today’s biggest movies draw from a reservoir of narrative components, fascinated by the very possibilities of arrangement, exchange, and interaction. By self-consciously foregrounding storytelling elements — scenes, characters, lines, props, images, sounds, etc. — these movies prove sufficiently reassuring to funders and fans to get a greenlight while still cultivating sufficient after-action discussion to retain enough audience mindshare to bridge the gap between installments.”
“From the 1970s to now, the systematicity at work at the industry’s highest levels has morphed, placing at its center, or very near its center, a morphology no longer Proppian but componential. Innovation in this context consists not in the elements themselves, wherever they are cadged from, but in the combination of unexpected occurrence and surprising competence. Only afterward we will see just how the pieces were rearranged.”
“In Jurassic World, in Mad Max: Fury Road, in 2012’s Prometheus, in 2011’s The Thing, we have a new industrial solution to the question of whether a movie is a sequel or a reboot — whether it exists within the narrative continuity established by the earlier films or whether it is in the process of purging that story-world of undesirable elements.”
“It can seem like the same story, more or less — and it feels better or worse, depending. But at every switchpoint the alternatives have been considered and these elements have been chosen.”
“Those elements build worlds, and world-building, done right, has enormous downstream consequences. Tactile and sonic objects make movies “toyetic,” as anyone who has visited the toy section of a big-box retailer this holiday could tell you. (I took a loop around a mid-market mall between my opening day screenings, and 12 stores had Classic Star Wars or Force Awakens merch in the front window.) Compelling, open-ended design spaces can be readily ported into theme park rides or entire lands (Star Wars is getting its own version of The Wizarding World of Harry Potter). Narratives with scalar capacity can spin-off alternate plots, accumulating an entire universe.”
“Star Wars’s continuity problems were similarly thorny. The commitment to the canon was legendary, and the accumulated stories in novels, comics, television, and on and on had elevated the keeper of the universe bible, Leland Chee, to something like the mock-high-priest of the place. Such complex canons can turn off casual fans. In the wake of its purchase of Lucasfilm, Disney held off on deciding what to do about the mountain of prior Star Wars materials until this past summer when the entire “Expanded Universe” — everything outside the movies — was declared non-canon.”
“At the narrative level, messes look like continuity problems, and there are ways of dealing with those. Comics readers are as used to the practice of “retconning” — retroactively justifying a narrative innovation or inconsistency — as moviegoers are to rebooting. The Expanded Universe purge amounts to something like disconning — breaking the hold of the continuity altogether.”
“Fans have been cleaning up and remaking Star Wars almost from the get-go, and one of the reasons that the excision of the Expanded Universe was felt so strongly was that it came awfully close to discounting fans’ extensions of franchise. The Force Awakens is a salve to those fans not because it restores the Expanded Universe, but because it plays to the sort of maker culture that inspired fan-versions of the earlier films.”
“Should we toss the whole thing? Nearly all the criticism of The Force Awakens, smart and otherwise, notes the overwhelming parallels with the first film. I’ve tried to explain that without explaining it away. But only the best criticism that I’ve seen takes up a second problem: the need to avoid watching (or listening) closely. Here’s Lili Loofbourow: “Star Wars is shallow and silly and campy and fun, and a dozen other synonyms that suggest we shouldn’t think about it too hard.” Here’s Aaron Bady: “Everything that puts you in the moment, when you’re watching it, falls apart as soon as you turn your brain back on.” And, finally, here is Abigail Nussbaum: “The original Star Wars films are fractally awful. The closer you examine them, the more apparently fatal flaws you notice.” Each of them will go on to note exactly what is morally or narratively or otherwise insupportable in the movies, and, by extension, in the Star Wars universe as a whole. And each of them will also find something to hold on to, but something that reads as much like an admission of critical weakness as a recognition of aesthetic success.”
“I hope it’s obvious by now that isn’t my approach. Instead of noting the fatal flaws and cordoning off their import, I would rather ask whether the movie, at its best, can bear our attention.”
“No, the best thing about The Force Awakens is BB-8. The droid sounds metallically hollow and yet inside its smooth surface are untold mysteries. These emerge unexpectedly from panels that slide or pop or hinge open in a process we might call facetization.”
“It thus mediates the analog and the digital, real enough to promise an actual world, digital enough to escape our real world’s constraints. To watch BB-8 leave a smoothed track in the sand or gingerly doink its way down a set of stairs is to feel the pull of a very particular materiality, one that everywhere suggests an almost endless chain of concepts.”
“It is the droid they are looking for, hence the object of both nostalgia and suspense.”
“If we aren’t paying close attention to The Force Awakens, BB-8 will be cute. Paying attention, we realize that it is the material emblem of the revitalized Star Wars universe, the ways that universe, like a bubble, must balance internal and external pressures, the ways it tucks innumerable aspects of earlier films into itself and rolls onward in the service of Disney’s long-term profitability.”
“BB-8 is an example of making things right — not in the sense of restoring order to the Force or apologizing for past Special Editions — but in the sense of making a movie that knows what it’s about.”