Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)

*Spoilers*

It is the most anticipated movie of the year, and then some. It is the sequel fans have been waiting for since 1983. It is the contemporary master of nostalgia cinema J.J. Abrams take on the holy grail of franchises. It's buzz tremendous, it is being eagerly greeted as a spiritual experience perhaps greater then a personal visited by Pope Francis. It is Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens, and it is good, maybe even real good, but its not great.

A recent article on Vice tagged this movie as 'the least interesting Star Wars yet', and I think that nails it, though a statement like that requires some unpacking. Lucas's prequel trilogy to his original set has come to be nearly cinematic shorthand for failing expectations. To those who grew up on the original films the lead up to the release of Episode I: The Phantom Menace was heady times indeed. We were stoked in 1999 that Lucas would again give us a big screen Star Wars experience, that wasn't just a slight reediting of the first three films liked he'd given us in 1997. There was denial I think at first for many us, the movie just wasn't that good, and the two that came after it also not on par with the original now sacred trilogy. We blamed Lucas, and to a lesser extent Hayden Christensen. The master had gone astray, seduced by the dark side much as Anakin had been. But Abrams would be our Luke Skywalker, he would rescue the franchise, he would restore balance to The Force. And he did, kind of.

It was in many ways an unenviable challenge and perhaps Abrams was the only name you could attach to the property to put people at an instant ease. He had a way with these things, he was a turn around artiest, be they franchises like Mission Impossible and Star Trek, or neglected genera types like 80's style family adventure movies (Super 8) or to a lesser extent monster destroying city pics (Cloverfield). Abrams could make things cool, Star Wars was inherently cool, so it shouldn't be a problem for him. But the task at hand, the job he confronted was what do we, both he and us the collective audience, want these new Star Wars movies to be? It is a question that in-fact I still don't know my personal answer to. But I know the answer that most people seem to have had, they wanted more of the same, they wanted the feel of the original trilogy back, and they go that. Episode VII feels like one of the first three films, more specifically it feels like Episode IV, but more on that later.

Abrams took the safe choice, the popular choice, he avoided risk. This is what Disney no doubt wanted of him, he took the road more traveled and that made all the difference. In his prequel trilogy Lucas let his creative energies fly, not just in the visuals, harbingers of our excessively computer soaked blockbusters of today, but in the story. Lucas sought to expand the universe of his own creation, taking it places in the era of Clinton and Bush II that he couldn't have gone in the time of Carter of Regan. The prequel movies were opened up, they were free of the constraints of the earlier productions in terms of sets and scope and budget. Naboo was impressive, so was Coruscant. We were seeing the mythologiesed  past of The Old Republic only hinted at in the original trilogy. We were seeing a Camelot, were Jedi Knights had been the guardians of galactic order for ages. We were seeing the seeds of destruction planted as they paved the way for the collapse of the old order. We were seeing the story of how Anakin Skywalker became Darth Vader, a sort of hero's journey in reverse the paved the way and added more context to the mythic Joseph Campbell hero's journey of Luke in the original trilogy. Lucas took a risk in telling that story, he could have just continued with the original cast (Harrison Ford's schedule permitting) and people would have eaten it up (as they are now). We knew the end of Anakin's story, why did we need to see the beginning?

UNDER CONSTRUCTION