Such was the absence of any profoundly insightful critical thinking about Star Wars: The Force Awakens which greeted its arrival that both audiences and critics hyping it as a return to some mythical loss of the “greatness” of the franchise due to the perceived “failure” of the prequels failed completely to see through to what was actually happening. Star Wars: The Force Awakens succeeds as a return to the unambiguous space opera of the original trilogy by synthesizing its music, cast and cinematography to essentially become a remake of the original trilogy in miniature rather than an authentic sequel capable of standing on its own.
What remains of genuine interest then is how the filmmakers clearly made a conscious decision to remake the original trilogy and reject the evolutionary steps taken in the prequels. Essentially, it becomes a matter of composition. One of the most beloved scenes from A New Hope takes place in a cantina where a funky alien band plays a jazzy tune that sounds nothing like the rest of the musical score. The Force Awakens almost exactly duplicates the inclusion of that scene inside Maz Kanata’s watering hole by substituting a reggae sound for the jazzy allusion in the original. More than one critic has observed that Kanata’s bar may not actually be called a cantina, but it most definitely is a cantina. Even more to the point is that Maz Kanata may as well be Yoda with her oversized eyes on a puppet-like anatomy. Of course, Maz is not the only character in the movie that awakens memories of the characters from the original trilogy.
One of the reasons that the Stars Wars prequels may be so despised by so many is that it is impossible to just sit there mindlessly and still keep track of the good guys and the bad guys. The ambiguous nature of good and evil is explored throughout those three movies, but lurking over them all is the inescapable fact that the hero of the prequels is the kid who grows up to become the villain of the next three movies. That may just be too hard for most moviegoers to wrap their head around so it probably comes as little surprise that the makers of The Force Awakens decided to go back to the Han Solo model of the original trilogy. For all the talk of Solo being a swaggering anti-hero, he’s simply far less anti- than he is –hero. The casting of The Force Awakens not only goes back to this concept of simplistically separating the bad guys from the good guys, it even seems determined to create its own Han Solo clone to keep the roguish good guy going now that the actual Han has been killed off.
Watching the character of Poe has the effect of instilling a sense of déjà vu; his swagger is all Solo and the feeling that one has seen this guy before is not merely déjà vu because fans have seen a lot of the characters in The Force Awakens before. Kylo Ren expresses through bouts of rage some deeply simmering daddy issues, but then that’s kind of what George Lucas did with the teenage Anakin Skywalker and his ambiguous parentage. Except that Kylo Ren is really more of a mixture of Darth Vader and young Luke from the original trilogy. Kylo is a brooding agent of evil one minute and a whiny little kid who doesn’t seem to know what he wants the next.
The closest that The Force Awakens gets to stimulating critical thought through the possibility that good and evil are ambiguous concepts is in the character of Finn who starts off as an evil killing machine in a Stormtrooper uniform. Except that right from the beginning Finn becomes the first indication that real humans live inside those uniforms and with the exception of a natural desire to run away from death, he is every bit as much a pure good guy as Han from the original trilogy. Finn is yet another character who expressed a desire get going only when the going finally got to be too tough to do otherwise.
The so-called return of the franchise to the “greatness” of the original trilogy is simultaneously realized and undone by how the character of Snoke resembles the portrayal of the Emperor in episodes IV, V and VI. Not only does the casting literally dehumanize him by creating Snoke with CGI, but the cinematography almost exactly duplicates the way the Emperor was first introduced as a holographic image. Why choose to emulate a version of a character whose memory is completely overshadowed by that of his underling Darth Vader in place of the prequel trilogy’s portrayal of that very same character in a way that humanizes him and thus transforms him into the single most complex and psychologically interesting individual in the entire franchise?
Here’s one possible explanation: unambiguous evil is more comforting for most people to understand than ambiguous morality.
