A "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" Review That Doesn't Spoil Shit

Straight off the top:  Star Wars does not feel right without the 20th Century Fox fanfare at the top.  I wish Disney could buy them just for the purpose of making Star Wars feel whole again.

Back in 2007, I tore apart Superman Returns, partially for holding the balls of Richard Donner's Superman movies as if it's trying to keep them warm and shielded, like Superman does for Metropolis.  Because of that, and because Bryan Singer didn't think Superman should fight anything, it never really comes together as an original work.  Star Wars: The Force Awakens is a lot like that.  It doesn't hold the original Star Wars' balls quite as tightly, but there's definitely some light ball-tickling going on.

In other words, I hope you like Star Wars, because JJ Abrams is about to show you how much he likes Star Wars.  Yes, I call it "Star Wars."  "A New Hope" is stupid.

Anyway, JJ Abrams is way into that movie.  So much, in fact, that he takes great care to recreate some of the scenes from Star Wars in his movie, but he JJ's them up so you don't notice what he's doing.  It isn't a knock on The Force Awakens, because his story is its own thing.  He just has a clear love for Star Wars that he can't help but let us see.  JJ loves Star Wars so much that I bet he still calls it "Star Wars."

As a result, two-thirds of the movie is really good.  He's really good about allowing us to find out what happened to the characters we really love while letting us get to know these new characters.  In true Star Wars tradition, you don't find out anything about the new characters so much as you get to hang out with them for a while, before realizing later that you don't know much about them at all.  They're just so funny and likable that you never notice.

Like, Finn, for instance.  Finn is what would happen if you took a regular person from here and dropped them into Star Wars.  Unlike every other character in Star Wars lore who grew up in a place where slugs become crime lords and people can be choked from across the street, Finn ain't about this life.  And it shows.  Everybody in the world who dreams about living in the Star Wars universe, thinks that if they went there, they'd suddenly learn the force or enjoy living in space, but Finn is your reality.  Finn is what you'd actually be like.  He's not a coward, but he's terribly confused about what life is like out here, and really doesn't get why we all need to be out here fighting when we can all get ships that go to the Outer Rim.  In a way, he's a twist on Han Solo, who didn't think it was worth sacrificing his life in the service of the Rebellion.

Then, there's Rey, a scavenger girl surviving on a desert planet.  She lives a difficult life, getting ripped off by the local scrap yard guy who pays her in food, and sleeping in the wreckage of an old AT-AT Walker.  When she isn't scavenging or fixing stuff, she sits and watches the ships fly off this barren desert planet.  And even though she lives this hard knock life, she still manages to have a heart for sad sacks that come stumbling across her front door.  She's almost the inverse of Luke Skywalker, because she doesn't dream of leaving this world at all, even though she should probably want to.

Kylo Ren isn't likable, though.  Not at all.  The previous villains were cool or charismatic in different ways, or carried themselves with a presence.  Darth Vader was awe-inspiring and ruthless.  Darth Maul was designed to be cool.  Christopher Lee's voice alone made Count Dooku memorable.  Even General Grievous was completely original, with some old school built in.  But Kylo Ren isn't like that.  He comes off like he's trying to be someone else, and acts very much like a spoiled child at times.  For all I know, that was the point.

As for what happens in the movie, there's a lot of action, it looks really good, and it is imaginative, because after all, this is a JJ Abrams movie.  If nothing else, he's going to take your breath way with his action scenes.  There was never a worry about that, because if he could make the Starship Enterprise exciting, imagine what he could do with the Millennium Falcon.

But then, there's that last third of the movie.  I remember reading a review about Revenge of the Sith when it came out that said that George Lucas was basically forcing the plot to go where he needed it to go, logic be damned (and that review was right).  There was an end point that had already been predetermined, and he needed to get these loose ends tied up before the credits roll, which is why Yoda just up and decided that he needed to go into exile.  There are moments like that, where it felt like they had decided where these characters needed to end up and they were gonna get there, logic be damned.  The last third of this movie kinda felt like JJ remembered that he needed to hit a couple more beats before he wrapped this thing up.

In my mind, it's like he delivers the script, and its brilliant, but someone at the studio was like, "There are no clips from the third act that we can put into the trailer.  Give us some trailer moments."  And he gets mad and hate-writes a new third act for them.  I mean, it's just kinda there, aside from discovering that Princess Leia had an army of Jedi babies without Han or Chewbacca deciding that he's had enough of Han's shit and they finally scrap it out.  The last third of the movie left me with questions, and not the kind where you're like, "I wonder where this is gonna go next?"  No, it's the kind of questions like, "Lemme rewind this and watch it again, because I must have missed something."

But it's a good movie.  Just one that's going to take some time for me to really appreciate.  JJ did a good job of working in the original trilogy's universe organically, and there are so many moments where I was pointing at the screen in excitement, because I suddenly saw something I recognized.  He also wrote this thing as if the prequels never happened, which is good, because I doubt anyone's gonna go into this like, "This thing better address the final fate of Watto, or I want my money back."  No, The Force Awakens dovetails out of Return of the Jedi, but in a way that is both familiar and new at the same time.  It's kind of comforting to spend another couple of hours in a that galaxy again.

Will Smith, Independence Day, and boring-ass off-screen deaths

I don't think there's a person out there that likes off-screen deaths in movies.

Not the kind where they're killed off-screen, but then, you learn later on in the movie what happened.  I mean the kind where you spend two or three hours (or more) investing emotionally in these characters, then when the new one comes out, you find out that they died, and no one cares.  That shit sucks.

Some movies handle it better than others, because the Rocky movies killed off Adrian and Paulie that way.  But the Rocky movies dealt with it by making it part of the story.  Adrian's death was part of the reason why Rocky and his son had a wedge between them in Rocky Balboa, and (SPOILERS), it was the reason why Rocky gave up on his own failing health in Creed.

Then, you got those assholes over at Fox who gave you two and a half hours of Ripley trying to save this little girl from acid-bleeding aliens, in the middle of space, only to find out that Newt died anyway in between Aliens and Alien 3.  Alien 3 is almost twenty years old and people still list that as one of the reasons why they never liked that movie.  They just brushed all that joy and goodwill aside so they could tell their story, instead of giving the payoff that the fans wanted.  It's just one in a long list of reasons why Sylvester Stallone is a better filmmaker than you.

No one likes that second method, why is why Roland Emmerich did exactly that with Independence Day: Resurgence.  

Now, let's be clear:  I seriously doubt that anyone was emotionally invested in any of the characters in Independence Day.  I know I'm going out on a limb here, and please correct me if I'm wrong.  Tell me that you felt the emotional depth of the angry teenage boy who just wants to love his family, or the war hero President of the United States.  However, the way they got rid of Will Smith's character in Resurgence is kinda lame.

You didn't know Will Smith wasn't coming back for Resurgence?  My bad. Spoilers.

Because they didn't offer Will Smith enough money he's too big a star for this foolishness now Suicide Squad has a better shot at keeping his name hot they didn't offer Jaden a role as his stepson that looks just like him Will Smith declined to come back to the movie that started July 4th as "Will Smith Weekend," they had to kill off his character.  It only makes sense, because he can't be alive anywhere in the world while this is going on and not come back.  It had to be this, because only the Avengers can get away with not having to explain why Iron Man couldn't come help Captain America take down three flying aircraft carriers, or Thor had to fend off another alien invasion by himself.

And you know what, I'm fine with Will Smith's character being dead.  I get it.  It wasn't that kind of movie, where people get attached to the characters.  Really, we just like Will Smith.  But if you gotta kill him off, you gotta do better than this:

"While test piloting the ESD’s first alien hybrid fighter, an unknown malfunction causes the untimely death of Col. Hiller. Hiller’s valor in the War of ‘96 made him a beloved global icon whose selfless assault against the alien mothership lead directly to the enemy’s defeat. He is survived by his wife Jasmine and son Dylan."

You don't have to show any of this shit on screen, so there isn't a single reason why it has to be that boring.  Maybe the producers feel like they needed to show respect to Will Smith's character, but that's really dumb, because he doesn't work there anymore.  Besides, they already disrespected him by killing him off-screen.  We're already past the point of disrespect, so you might as well go all the way.  Because if I was writing the movie, Will Smith's Capt. Steven Hiller would have gone through some shit before he died.

Why the hell not?  It's not like you're limited by your special effects budget.  So why couldn't we find out that Capt. Hiller, despite all his confidence and bravado, had a really hard time dealing with the knowledge that the fate of humanity rested on his shoulders?  Maybe that led to some drinking, some depression, some PTSD.  Maybe he broke down completely, and believed that the aliens were still out there and were trying to control minfd.  No one really knew how to help him, and he believed he was alone in this.  So he tries to fight back against his perceived enemies in the government that he believes have already been compromised.  And his story ends with him driving his car off of a bridge, because he believes that the aliens have finally broken his mind as well.

Now, Vivica A. Fox is back in this movie, and evidently, her son (Hiller's stepson) is supposed to be one of heroes of this movie, because of course he is.  And I'm sure their characters will be sufficiently boring.  But it would be so much better if they came into the movie with something like this over their heads.  Of course they're gonna fight the aliens, but now, it's personal.

And maybe Will Smith sees that synopsis, and it looks interesting to him.  He could work with that material.  And he calls up Roland Emmerich, and asks to make that movie, because that's what Will Smith does now.  He just goes around making movies that seem interesting to him, and it's good to know that someone thought After Earth was interesting.  A movie about the complete mental breakdown of the hero from Independence Day is way more interesting than that same guy fighting the aliens again.  And Fox is dying to make a franchise out of this.  $50-70 million would be in their hands before Will Smith could come to his senses.

That sort of thing should be the template for off-screen deaths.  I'm not naive.  I know that those times can't be avoided sometimes.  But if you're already going to have to do it, you might as well make it count for something, and change the story going forward.