The Force Awakens

(This review does contain some spoilers.)

It pains me to say it, my fellow Star Wars fans, but we need to be honest about this: When we look at the movies objectively, they aren't really that good. The original trilogy perhaps was great in its day, but it hasn't aged well. The special effects are all right, but it's a question of how impressive they were. We can't talk about them without a bit of nostalgia creeping in. The dialogue is more cringe-inducing than we like to admit. The characters we love are really a sort of Platonic ideal of the characters that were actually in the movie. And then there were the prequels...

Having conceded all that, I go no farther. Star Wars is loved, and is worth loving, for the world-building. No amount of whining on Luke Skywalker's part can negate the fact that he wields a lightsaber, which remains the coolest weapon ever conceived. No matter how dated the effects get, Tatooine will always be a desert planet with two suns, inhabited by a rich variety of sentient life, only a fraction of whom we ever get to know in the movies. The Jedi and the Force, the Empire and the Rebellion, Dagobah and Cloud City, are all rich and real.

Even the prequels, for better or worse, engage in this world-building. Naboo, Kamino, Mustafar, Dugs, even (I'll go there) Gungans. These things were new. That galaxy far, far away has a lived-in feel that more than compensates for all its flaws. There's a sense that we've never quite seen it all--that the characters were doing interesting things before we met them, and continued doing interesting things after they left the scene. There are more planets to explore, more aliens to meet. It all exists, even if you don't see it. That illusion is the real genius of Star Wars. That's the reason we love it, and the reason it deserves to be loved.

And that brings us to The Force Awakens. I was very nervous to see this movie--afraid that it might somehow break the Star Wars universe. It didn't. The galaxy is no smaller for the existence of Episode VII.

Unfortunately, it isn't much bigger, either. As I watched a droid who spoke in beeps and blips receive an important message from a resistance fighter in trouble, wander through the desert, be found by an unhappy young adult for whom the message was not intended, and that young adult set off in the Millennium Falcon for unexpected adventures, learn about the Force from a short, eccentric, ancient alien, inherit her father's lightsaber, duel a black-armored Sith who answered to an old but powerful master and had a mysterious family connection, and finally help blow up a superweapon, I couldn't avoid thinking that I'd seen this movie before, almost exactly.

But not quite. Stormtroopers (well, a Stormtrooper) are given more depth, with hints of stories behind those uniform white masks. The Dark Side has a few new tricks. In the best scene as far as universe expanding goes, an aging Han Solo is confronted by members of two different gangs he is cheating in some sort of scam that involves him transporting three monstrous animals, but before anything really comes of it, the monsters get out and eat the gangsters, and our heroes escape by the skin of their teeth in the Millennium Falcon. Good, exciting stuff, but nothing really new.

In many ways, The Force Awakens felt more like a loose reboot than a sequel. Perhaps that was the intent, but if this new version is going to work, future installments need to prove that they understand what made the franchise worth rebooting in the first place.