Old Friends, New Days - Star Wars: The Force Awakens

First the bad news.

What follows will not be profound. There is nothing I can say about what Star Wars means – has always meant – to me that will be wholly original. Litanies have been written on the topic lately, many more sublime than anything I can hope to best. Heck there's no shame in it; a lot of folks just have better stories. I wasn't alive in 1977, so I can't claim to have been there the moment the first Star Destroyer crawled (and crawled...and crawled) across the screen, changing cinema forever. I can only join the ranks of the millions around the globe who confess without shame or compunction that I love Star Wars, and like those countless millions who share that love, I faced the premiere of The Force Awakens with a mix of excitement and trepidation.

The moments before the curtain fell were to me like waiting on the platform of a train station, or in an airport, anticipating the arrival of a long-gone love. My palms were sweaty and my heart just wouldn't climb out of my throat. Nervous? About a movie? Hell, yes. We had a history, Star Wars and me, and it hadn't always been good. We grew up together, after all, but we also grew older together, hit rough patches together, and eventually, perhaps inevitably, grew apart. Sure, I'd check in on her once in a while, perhaps read a review of the latest video game or a blurb on the new season of Clone Wars, but mostly I kept my distance, twitchy about her new look, fearful she had drifted so far from the Star Wars I knew I wouldn't recognize her if I tried. Besides, we had fights; we disagreed. I told her she looked lazy in those prequels, like she had phoned in 10 years worth of hype for a quick billion and some new action figures. “Tough beans,” she said. “8 year-olds love it. And Greedo shot first.”

But a love that storied isn't so lightly tossed aside. I carried a torch for Star Wars even when it seemed to all the world like I had moved on. It was the good times, you see, that kept her tethered to me: VHS marathons; reams of comics; stacks of paperback novels, their pages compulsively dog-eared, the corners torn; not to mention endless conversations and scrupulous analyses with my fellow Star Warriors. Those moments were aging like good wine in the cellar of adolescent memory (along with SATs, driving tests, long car rides, and snowbound weekends), and the temptation was to entomb them forever, never chancing to taint them with new input. There they'd be safe from my encroaching cynicism toward the world, that metastasizing snark that comes naturally, I think, with the passage of time. There they might stay, perpetually aglow in the rosy gauze of good feelings.

It was not to be. And to have it – all of it – dragged out and thrown back on the fire was cause for more than a few butterflies. I knew it was coming. The Mouse paid 4 billion for this; they were going to get their investment back. I just didn't think it would happen so blasted soon. I'd read the stories. I'd seen the trailers. I knew the work of J.J. Abrams. It seemed as though he'd followed through on his (carefully phrased, politely worded) promise not to repeat the (hundreds) of missteps and baffling calls George Lucas made in Episodes I, II, and III. The shots carefully doled out to the public looked real-ishly gritty instead of cartoon glossy. The cast was solid. Lawrence Kasdan was back on the typewriter. The actors betrayed no hint of that anemic, glassy-eyed glaze they get when working against naught but acres of green-screen. Yes, Disney was at the helm now, and sure, they own about a quarter of the planet by now...but they didn't get where they are by making crap or alienating their audience. Right?

Still, Star Wars had broken my heart once – no, three times – and I couldn't shake the thought that The Force Awakens would be the last dagger in my pincushioned backside, already stabbed half a hundred times by grabby pretenders who mutilated my love and turned her against me. Et tu, Mr. Abrams?

Now the good news: it didn't happen.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens is an excellent film. It is even a wonderful film. On its own it would easily stand as one of the most entertaining of the year, a triumph of cinematic equilibrium, balancing sensational effects and eye-popping action with grounded characters and solid story-telling. But as a Star Wars film, it is magical. Why? Because it did what many of my generation believed impossible: it returned my love – our love – to us hale, whole, and more beautiful than ever. The expression “Episode VII” was something my grade school chums and I used to say with the same buoyant fancy reserved for topics like flying cars, moon colonies, or Crusade being renewed. We'd nod and sigh and look down at the comics in our laps and think “If only...”, and knew it would never happen.

It happened. And seeing “Episode VII” crawl across the endless field of stars to the thundering cadence of the London Symphony Orchestra was something akin to transmigration, as if I were seeing another world through some cross-time analogue of myself where the impossible became real.

What a relief it turned out to be a damn good flick.

Some thoughts (caution: this constitutes very mild spoilers, but purists be warned; I dabble in some insider intel):

• The joy is back – 3-dimensional characters drink deep and – more importantly – share from a wellspring of broad and believable emotion. It contrasts so starkly with the woodenness of the prequel trilogy, it is like a gust of warm light cleaving your chest again and again. I grinned, I cried, I laughed out loud often and unexpectedly. Even in the low moments, when the heroes were heartsick or imperiled, I beamed inside because Star Wars made me feel something again, and the cumulative emotion enveloping all others was joy, utter knee-weakening joy. It stayed with me for a long time, well after I'd left the theater and resumed my day. Certain scenes replayed hourly, each time reforming in my head at a different angle, sometimes – even often – allowing for fresh insight. It's a testament to the emotional footprint the film leaves.
  
  
• Comparisons to the prequels are a fool's errand, or at best, too easy – It's true. Despite what I said above, it will be my last cheap shot. The temptation is go the easy path, the critical Dark Side if you will, and hold TFA up to Lucas's efforts from a decade ago by virtue of the fact they were 'the last Star Wars'. But just because you can do it doesn't mean you should. J.J. Abrams is not George Lucas (clearly), and these films were made almost entirely without Lucas's input. When The Man did weigh in, uncorking his whispery reticence for the first and possibly last word on the matter, he said he would have done it differently. I don't doubt it. But what of it? Love or hate them, the prequels are in the past. It's a new day; we shouldn't carry the weight of old ghosts.
  
  

• Abrams brought his A-game – While he might be accused of horsewhipping his plots along (Lord, but he does), for me Abram's frying-pan-to-the-fire style only started to grate during the second Trek film, largely because he seemed more interested in set pieces and action than the little moments in between (I still can't remember why Khan and Spock were having a fistfight on a...was it a train? Some kind of flying space train? Does it matter?). Here the character bits and quiet interims, still brief and brutally economic, flow more naturally and serve a higher purpose than to simply cleanse the palette for the next exploda-ganza. Abrams has a leg up in that the movie is filled with characters we already know and love; thus our emotions are already perched on a high dive, ready to plunge the moment our fan faves appear. But the newcomers are never sold short, either for quantity or quality of screen time. When the action kicks in, it kicks like mule but stays coherent – no easy feat for a director, even harder in a SW film. There isn't a single scene that feels wasted, tacked on, egregious, or dumb. Space battles remain a strong point for Abrams, and here he seems to have borrowed not only from his Star Trek playbook but also from Lucas's purer efforts, throwing us head-first into the cockpits for rapid-fire snapshots of the unfolding melee, then pulling back for the occasional sweeping shot sure to elicit awe.
  
  
• The cast – new and old – has exceptional chemistry – Those character moments I talked about are best when two or more of the cast are on screen at once. The actors seemed to have tapped an open circuit of mutual good feeling, feeding off one another and belting out their lines with confidence, relish, and potent humanity. An early scene in which turncoat Stormtrooper Finn and debonair Resistance pilot Poe join forces to escape a Star Destroyer creates a delightfully tenable sense of fraternity between the two men, such that you know they will remain friends for life though they've known one another for 5 minutes. Similarly, Finn's John Boyega and Rey's Daisy Ridley have an instantly authentic rapport, a throwback to the hot-blooded sword-dance Han and Leia had in the first trilogy before that kiss in the asteroid (I think poor Finn is smitten, and who can blame him?). The Originals, meanwhile, feel like they've been been frozen in amber all this time, as they jump straightaway back into the jabbing humor and cocksure banter we'd recognize in any language. Han and Chewie, well...they're Han and Chewie. Need I say more?
  
  
• The villain is the boldest choice of all – Despite a gap of 32 years, TFA elected to go bare-bones on the backstory and not dwell on what happened while we were away. Again, it's Advance the Plot or Die! Tall order, one that demanded a ready-made antagonist whose motivations were clear from the outset and who wouldn't confuse the audience with subtler things like spycraft and deceit. We got that in Kylo Ren, a Sith-wannabe whose ominous black cloak and armored fright mask leave no doubt of his loyalties or his intentions. But is he trying too hard? After all, he wields the Force like a drug and brandishes his showy cross-guarded lightsaber so frequently we wonder if it isn't some sort of surrogate safety blanket. He might have been still another flat, throat-constricting mannequin there only to growl and puff. But before long we realize things about him that turn our perception of him on its ear. Ren is a deep dude: conflicted, burdened, hesitant even – a man whose mask is less an homage to Vader than a means of hiding heady misgivings about the choices he's made. “Look how old you've become,” he says to Max von Sydow's Lor San Tekka in an attempt to unnerve the stoic hero. “Something far worse has happened to you,” Tekka replies, and we swear we feel Ren shrink a little. We're used to seeing Jedi tempted by the Dark; here we see a villain tempted by the call of Goodness, and his rage at his own weakness translates into a violence that is terrible to behold. Still, we can't help but pity him. After all, we've been there, he hasn't; we know that no matter how much death and destruction he rains down on his foes, he'll never find the solace he so badly craves. What an angle.
  
  
• Opinions will differ, but the parallels with A New Hope are undeniably intentional – Armchair critics and next-morning know-it-alls have cited the pervasive sense of sameness with Episode IV as a shortfall with this film. Yes, TFA contains dozens of similarities to the original, including the central plot, but that should not be viewed as a bad thing, nor as a lack of originality. Lucas and Kasdan speak often of their love of heroic tales, epic poems, and episodic adventure series. All of those things are sometimes called by a different descriptor: cycles. Star Wars is fantasy, and all the best fantasies spin their yarn in a cyclical fashion: Beowulf, Arthur, Gilgamesh, the Arabian Nights, Flash Gordon. Stories repeat themselves with tidal regularity, ebbing and flowing, and eventually dredging up the bones of the past again in new flesh. Why? Well, part of it surely stems from the comfort of the familiar, the easy fit of a script that feels like old sneakers, but more importantly because the themes Star Wars explores are universal and immutable: love, friendship, power, faith, redemption, good, evil. 32 years on, Han and Leia and Luke finally realize our successes are never so complete that we can hope to leave the hard lessons behind. As they wrestle with the specters of their colorful history and the consequences of their actions, we feel a thread of affinity with them, these fictitious characters in a galaxy far, far away. So yes, the Starkiller base is another Death Star. Supreme Leader Snoke? He's the Emperor. So what if it's old wine, so long as we're enjoying the company we keep while we're drinking it? But Abrams never lets us get too comfortable; he turns every convention 5 degrees off-kilter and lets the friction blow sparks in every direction. It keeps us – and our heroes – on their toes.
  
  

• The lived-in Universe is back – One of the very first things Abrams set out to do – from the first picture he teased out on his Twitter feed – was to reaffirm his commitment to conventional effects wherever possible. He delivered. TFW is rife with puppets and rubber masks (and have you heard anyone bitch about it?). But even more powerful than the return of the spit-varnish effects was the...I'll say resoiling of the SW universe. The place looks used. Ships built for interstellar flight are covered with dings and dents and patchwork paint jobs. Characters recovering from fistfights have blood on their knuckles. The denizen of Jakku have sunburns and crow's feet. Dust clogs doorways. People sweat, for God's sake. This is as it should be. The original SW was shocking because it dared to show us a galaxy that depreciated with time. It was Firefly before we saw that again to any serviceable degree. Only the fanatical First Order bothers to polish their chrome (and Brylcreem their hair), and they look the appropriate douchebags for doing so.
  
  

• Harrison Ford looks happy again – and his performance reflects this. Best Han Solo ever.
  
  
• Fate, spirituality, and unseen hands play a large role – however grounded TFA seems in the action and the emotion, an undercurrent of the supernatural is ever-present. A careful read of the events as they transpire suggests there are no “allowable coincidences” in this film (though the conventions of fiction usually allow one per script), but rather that everything is proceeding on an ordained path. Yes, the right characters are always present at just the right times, and their actions prove correct no matter how many blind plunges they take into seemingly unwinnable frays. Conversely, the bad guys, no matter how many trump cards they possess, can never quite get the job done. Bad writing, you say? Or something greater? If you're conflicted, there's a clear marker for reference: about halfway through the film, the series of unfortunate events that has tossed the unlikely heroes together takes a turn for the nigh-paranormal, in which simple scrounger Rey receives what appears to be a mandate from the Force itself to stop (literally) hiding in the sand and become something more. From then on she ceases to be a desert scavenger and becomes more Joan of Arc, even brandishing her own version of the Sword in the Stone. As Gandalf once observed: “There is more at work in this world than just the will of evil...and that is an encouraging thought.” After all, Luke never would have blown up the Death Star if he had gone to Tosche Station that morning to pick up his power convertors.

Though the list could go on, the greatest critic will be you, dear reader, when you have the good fortune to sit comfortably and watch this great film for yourself. I encourage you to be zen about it, to let the story reveal itself in the fullness of time, and to not let what I hope will be an appreciation of this movie translate into retroactive rage at Mr. Lucas. For all his foibles, he is the father of it all, and I suspect even he is privately beaming with pride at how far his baby has come.

A final note on my TFA viewing experience: there was a time, when I was a young teenager, when I had my life planned out. I was convinced I was going to move to San Francisco and live as a professional writer. I could not have known 20 years ago how ludicrously expensive San Francisco as a dwelling spot would become, nor how the following two decades of economic mutation would reshape the landscape of jobs, money, opportunity, and the arts in this country. At 14 I was crazy enough to think I might actually one day work for George Lucas, (though I was at least sane enough to acknowledge it was an outside chance). The idea that he would retire never occurred to me. The idea that he would sell Star Wars to someone else would have been blasphemous. Suffice to say, things didn't happen the way I expected, and it was no coincidence my long “break” from Star Wars coincided with the realization my 14 year-old self didn't quite have all the answers. San Francisco just seemed like a happening place, and the fact that my future employer, the creator of Star Wars, lived just a scenic commute north of there...well!

But the Universe has a strange way of bringing us to the finish line by way of the most bizarre backroads. I did go to San Francisco, and when I did, it was for Star Wars. My host was not George Lucas, but one of those dear grade school chums I mentioned earlier, who invited me into his home and into his work, which just happened to be a refurbished theater in the heart of San Fran's Mission District where The Force Awakens was the debut film. My companion for the trip was another blood brother from the old days. Together we witnessed the future, and though it was a very different future from the one I imagined long ago, I wouldn't trade a single hour of it for anything else in the world.