This post began as a comment upon Pete’s piece below on the film, and upon the worthwhile piece by Tolkien-expert Gerry Canavan he links to.
Yes, spoilers follow, and yes, you should spend your time on Brooklyn instead, or, if you want adventure, there are these things called books, you know, that are chock-full of it: The Iliad, The Aeneid, The Mahabharata…
Anyhow, Pete’s point #2 is totally correct. You knew going into The Force Awakens that the violation of the original three movies’ happy ending was going to be the basic problem, but it’s even worse than you feared, because the movie spends so much time revisiting Leia, Han, Luke, etc. As Pete says, there’s apparently been very little happy-ending, or even breathing-spell-between-menaces, for them since Return of the Jedi. It doesn’t matter if you destroy the second Death Star, save the Rebel Fleet, kill the Emperor, and prove that Vader still had some good in him: things will still go to pot. And very quickly.
That can only mean that Star Wars (episodes 4-6) was a sham. Or, that this movie is a betrayal.
Contrary to what Canavan tries to imply, there is nothing remotely wise or tragic-sensed about this betrayal of the original magic of those films, particularly the first one. It is only “adult” in being jaded. Compare and contrast what Canavan reveals about Tolkien’s quickly-aborted attempt to write a piece set in his “Fourth Age” of Middle-Earth. Tolkien says he “discovered” several things about what would happen in Gondor, including the emergence of a secret Satanic cult. It’s always weird to read Tolkien saying he discovered this or that about his own imagined world, but what he apparently means is that following through on the logic of human (or elvish, etc.) nature and events, that this or that would follow. Middle-Earth (Arda, strictly speaking) was a literary world constructed carefully enough, and upon real wisdom and poetic precedent enough, to invite and sustain that kind of thinking, and that kind of discovery. The Star Wars world never was. Tolkien wisely chose to be silent about what would have to happen in the Fourth Age, in part to be true to the beautiful ending of The Lord of the Rings, but there was no literary necessity for the Star Wars world to go this way or that.
Rather, there was another kind of necessity at work, as Pete suggests. One about money. To sell tickets, they needed the saga to continue. And to exploit (not honor) a nostalgia many had developed for the first movies, they needed to do so with a number of the original characters still involved. It didn’t matter that this meant having to give Leia and Han egregiously unhappy life-stories after Return, or having to display Carrie Fisher and Harrison Ford in a very youth-oriented franchise as shockingly old-looking(simply no other choice in 2015). Or having to brutally kill Han. Or even, in a most hollow gesture of Lucas-imitating writing (and imitating an overrated aspect of his writing), to have it that the son of Han and Leia would turn out to be the new Vader, and one capable of such parricide.
Result: with the exception of the new characters, The Force Awakens is depressing. And, it feels forced, especially the obvious nostalgia-cues, which keep being shoved in our faces. So it is not as bad as the first three episodes, having more of a story and some characters one cares about, but that is not saying much. You leave feeling entertained, but with kind of a shrug. And if you bother to start thinking about it, you notice a bad aftertaste.
No-one had to make any of these movies past Return. (The tie-in comic books, novels, and other ancillary stuff would have happened anyway, but besides guys like Canavan, who cares?) I’m not going to grant Abrams the partial excuse Pete does by saying that “we” demanded a return to Luke, Leia, and Han again involved in galactic war, and so he just “gave it to us straight” about what that would have to mean. The movie could have been set long after episode six, so that Han and co. would be absent, so that the background history would make more sense, and so that the new characters Rey and Finn would be the main deal.
It is a tired culture that gives us twice-and-thrice regurgitated stories of this sort. It is an embarrassing culture that expects so much from the escapist comic-book class of entertainment in the first place, and especially after it has indulged in so much of it. And what can one say of story-merchants who repeatedly, unashamedly, peddle nostalgia for a certain innocence while simultaneously wanting to be praised for violating it, for giving us the “adult” take on stories whose only internal strength is their non-adult character?
The first Star Wars was a moment, wherein Lucas’s feel for early Hollywood swashbuckling romance, for emergent Counter-Culture pantheism, and for mythology-aping storytelling came together, with major help from technology and a magnificent score, to create something special, albeit limited. His development of his story in the next two movies was less successful in part because, well, a moment is a moment, but also because he began to make it too serious, i.e., he was trying to create on the fly a literary world that would, in its richness, at least distantly remind one of Tolkien’s, and he just didn’t have it in him. Aside from any comparisons, the world he could draw out of himself was not a poetically rich one when seen at full unfurling(as the prequel trilogy would make painfully obvious). To my way of thinking, we were always better off with Luke in love with Princess Leia than we were with the whole Leia’s your sister (Campbell-esque?) development. But Lucas had to see his story out, I guess, and Vader probably had to be Luke’s father, and up through Return it all worked out well-enough for what it was.
Really folks, and misters Lucas and Abrams in particular, we could have left it at that.
I’ll leave to others the explanation for Lucas’s error in pursuing the prequels. I simply don’t care that much, even though I was the perfect age when Star Wars came out and loved it heartily, and even though my yet-to-be-completed commentary on American Graffiti shows that I think highly of Lucas’s screen-writing and smarts.
But as for this latest Star Wars movie, I’ll just say there was nothing in today’s widespread nostalgia for that 1977 moment when all the key ingredients came together, a nostalgia that for many also reflects a certain cultural innocence before the cable/video/internet eras of Entertaining Ourselves to Death, that required its exploitation and defilement.
The Empire was overthrown, the Republic restored, and our characters lived happily ever after. That’s what my nine-year-old self tells me across the years, and when it comes to Star Wars, I’m taking his word for it.