Star Wars: The Force Awakens Review

Star Wars: The Force Awakens surpassed my hopes but was still a disappointment. It was great but also kind of mediocre.  Simply put, it defies my ability to review it.  

Roger Ebert famously hated the 4-star system, or the thumbs up/thumbs down system, or any of the other quick review methods, because it does a disservice to the film.  Liking or disliking a movie is about more than just craft, whether that be the skill of the director, actors, writers, special effects people, or whomever.  A movie can fail to capture you, even though every one of those people were perfect and a movie can enchant even though every one of those people screwed up.  The Force Awakens is even in a stranger position, because it’s not just being compared to movies, or other Star Wars movies, but to a movie world that no longer exists. In order to understand how I reacted to The Force Awakens, you have to know my Star Wars.

Star Wars as a franchise existed and was well established before I was introduced to it.  The first trilogy was released before I was born.  Both the West End Games Star Wars setting and Marvel comics lines that is very popular with slightly older fans, were well established before I was old enough to watch the first movies.  When I did see the trilogy for the first time, I was a little too young.  I remember hiding behind the couch when Vader first walks in, terrified.  But the magic worked.  Perhaps because the films are perfectly targeted at young boys, or maybe I just have a mind that goes for that sort of thing, I was completely hooked.   

I don’t know how many times I watch them before I discovered the books.  I think I started reading the Young Jedi Knight books first, but soon branched into the rest of the Expanded Universe.  LucasArts was learning as they went, as nobody had managed a media empire of this breadth before.  Even just within the books, there were contradictions and retractions.  The X-wing novels were describing a post Return of the Jedi galaxy that was similar, but incompatible with the Jedi Prince series.  None of it worked with the comic series Dark Empire, which had Palpatine’s Force ghost inhabiting clones of himself and rebuilding the Empire.  There was no “canon”, to my knowledge.  But every one of these new books was special, because this was still new.  Tie-in novels were not common place, these books were actually the sequels to the films.  And without the ubiquitousness of the internet, the arguments about what really could have happened given the inconsistencies were limited.  

So, you developed your own cannon.  Your favorite books became the “true” story and the books that did things you didn’t like or featured characters you wish never existed, became side stories that weren’t “true.”  Eventually, somebody would come along and tie things together and you’d have to acknowledge that a book you didn’t like actually counted, because it set up something you did.  It grew.

At some point it outgrew all but the most devoted of fans.  It outgrew me, anyway.  I started only reading the Star Wars books by favorite authors, only playing the video games.  With the release of Vector Prime, the book where they killed Chewbacca, Star Wars lost me.  They introduced a plotline of invading aliens from outside the galaxy who were immune to the Force and I didn’t care anymore.  It wasn’t my Star Wars.  Since then, I’ve read the occasional tie in, but all it fell apart.

The more astute Star Wars nerds among you may already point out that Vector Prime was probably not the biggest blow to my fandom at that time.  It was released the same year as Phantom Menace.  But honestly, Star Wars had become so personal to me, it took both to really kill it.  The Prequels completely abandoned the already established facts (“When I met your father, he was already an accomplished pilot” Ben tells Luke, but the movie shows him a young child who drives racers?  Surely that isn’t what Ben meant.  Also, the character is totally named Ben, Obiwan being his “Jedi” name, yet the prequels make it out to be the other way around.  Things like that.).   They told a story that was already told in the original trilogy.  Ben’s lies about Luke’s father were a sign of his deep regret in how the situation went down.  We didn’t need it spelled out for us.   I also later learned that Lucas himself approved the plot of Vector Prime to make sure it would match his vision of the future of Star Wars.   He was so concerned with continuity still, despite changing it constantly.   And his vision was not consistent.  I was hardly surprised when the last 20 years of non-film Star Wars was thrown out to pave the way for the new movie.

The original Star Wars were unabashedly fantasy.  Wizards and dragons, knights and princesses, heroes and villains, it was all there.  The first comics ran with that too.  But the books moved it into something else.  Timothy Zahn was the first to really apply science fiction to Star Wars, and it worked beautifully. His antagonist, Admiral Thrawn, was a blue skinned alien that can probably best be described as evil Sherlock Holmes.  He didn’t build Death Stars, he didn’t arbitrarily kill commanders who failed.  Instead, he out thought opponents, he made sensible decisions, and you hated him for it because he was the bad guy.  It anchored Star Wars not as some crazy fantasy world, but as a world where people learn from mistakes, grow, and you can’t sit still after a major victory. Stackpole’s X-Wing novels helped to sell that.  So when Lucas made the prequels, he worked harder to make them more science-y.  Midichlorians as a microorganism that allows people to manipulate the Force.  All the callouts to class of ship, the explanations of every phenomena, the politics, all of it felt so different from the first movies because it was absorbed from the Expanded Universe.  But it was mishandled and flopped.  All three were a huge disappointment. People say Episode III wasn’t bad, but I think that’s because expectations were so low, the fact that it was passable made it look good.

There’s a meme that the original trilogy is just as bad, people just have so much nostalgia around it that they like it.  I disagree.  I rewatched the original trilogy leading up The Force Awakens.  No special edition, no edits, I found an old copy of the theatrical releases and watched those.  They were fantastic.  Sure, there are flaws.  They aren’t perfect.  But they have a great flow, wonderful dialogue, they are fun, and they do things that are impressive.  Luke’s introduction.  The close ups and sound effect works as the door to Echo Base slams shut, followed by the long shot of Leia and Chewie.  The sense of majesty around Cloud City.  The lightning in Palpatine’s throne room.  It holds up as well as any action movie today.  

All of this brings me around to The Force Awakens.  In what world do I watch this movie?  If I watch it as a human, on Earth, who has followed Star Wars for sometime, it’s a solid movie.  It’s leaps and bounds better than the prequels.  It is a fun romp, it hits the right notes.  It’s a solid return to the fantasy element of it all, with more weird powers, less science, and more fun.  Rey is a new, better hero than Luke ever was.  Finn serves the role of 3P0 and Han at the same time, the coward and the reformed hero.  Poe will hopefully be more than just “the guy who saves the day all the time” in the next movie.  I’m thrilled at how inclusive the new movie is, with a strong female lead, a diverse cast, people who feel natural and lived in.  Every story I read about how young girls love Rey fills me with joy.  I wish there were more girls my age who had somebody like that, I think nerddom would be a lot more gender diverse if there had been.     

But, if I watch it as an extension of MY Star Wars, the one I tracked down books and games for, the one I built my own adventures in, the one I loved and adored as a child, The Force Awakens is mediocre.  Parts of it are amazing and what I want.  The X-wings flying over the lake, the lightsaber battles, the personal story around Rey, Finn, Kylo, Han and Chewie.  That’s what I wanted, that’s what I hungered for.  Rey is very close to the Jaina Solo from the novels, from her knack with machines to her attitude.  Kylo is almost a straight up adaptation of Jacen.  But it’s set in this confused mess that I don’t recognize.   Where’s the politics, the organizations, the maps?  I don’t understand who got blown up, or why, exactly?   What happened to lead to the political situation we are in now?  Who is Snoake?  Why the hell would you build another Death Star?  That got played out by every Kevin J. Anderson novel featuring a new one, why not go with Zahn’s more brilliant, more cunning Empire?  The number of Star Destroyers you could build for one Death Star enables you to project far more power than a single, planetary laser.  I don’t need to see this again.  Can you imagine the thrill that would go through the theater if Snoake walked out and was blue skinned with red eyes, like Thrawn? If Leia, Ackbar, and all the rest of these guys left the New Republic to form the Resistance, who is in the Republic and why would anybody care about it?  Considering it seems like the entire command structure just rebranded.  I don’t get it.  I want to, I want to understand it, I want to feel it in my bones like I did with the rest of Star Wars.   I want to know how things work, who is betraying whom and why nobody knows about Starkiller Base.  Or they do know, but nobody cares until after it is used and then have plans right away.  I want, I want, I want.

I want to have written the next chapter of Star Wars.  I want my stories to be the one that is out there, the stories I read and rewrote in my head into my own version of what happened after the Emperor was killed.  The Jaina Solo I had a crush on, the Borsk Fey’la I loved to hate, the Lando that wasn’t in The Force Awakens.  I want that story, the cobbled together from different parts, partially self-written, likely terrible, essentially even worse than Fan Fiction because it was never even written down, story, to appear on the screen.  Anything less, anything that doesn’t match the vision I grew up with, the vision I fed, cultivated, and lived in, is a let-down.  

But, if I can't have that, Star Wars: The Force Awakens is probably about the best I could hope for.  

Star Wars: The Force Awakens: Reviewed

Why I'm still watching "Blindspot" despite how crazy it is

I’ve been meaning to start this site up for sometime.  It seems weird to me that the first show I’m reviewing is a show like Blindspot, but gotta start somewhere, right?  Spoilers for the first 10 episodes of Blindspot, though not major ones, really.

Blindspot, NBC’s new show that’s basically another riff on the “What if we knew about crimes before they happened” show that’s been around forever.  It may the most common concepts in high-concept television these days.  Given the timing of the show, I have this image of some writer watching The Blacklist while the roommate watches Memento, and then just running down a hallway waving the pitch paper in the air shouting “I’VE GOT IT.”  But I digress.  

As far as high-concept television* goes, it’s not a particularly solid show.  Your pitch, a woman with amnesia covered in tattoos that hint at government corruption, runs into bizarre so fast that it hardly has time to be intriguing.  Your star is, at this point in her career, most famous for being in the Marvel movies as a supporting character, so I don’t know if Jaimie Alexander is really a huge selling point.  On that note, I think one of the big problems is that something that seems to have been framed as a vessel for Alexander is designed to fundamentally undercut her acting ability.  Her character is a blank slate and there’s not much for her to work with, she spends her time confused or a badass.  I hope as the show progresses we see more of her past, because that could give her time to shine, but they’ve cast the big name of the show in the part that has the least to do and is the least interesting.  

In execution, the show is dumb.  It’s tropey.  We know there’s a mole on the team because this kind of show always has a mole on the team, even though they’re supposed to be an elite, handpicked group of the best.  Characters constantly make decisions that seem to exist only to drive the plot forward (in episode 10, Weller just lets Jane Doe walk home alone instead of escorting her home, because Jane needs to be alone to be kidnapped).  I could go on.  So why am I still watching Blindspot?  

Well, the answer is, there is a world of difference between dumb stupid and dumb bonkers. And Blindspot is gloriously bonkers.    

I’ve already talked about what is wrong with the pitch, but what it gets right is how visual it is.  The real concept has nothing to do with fighting crime or government corruption.  Ultimately, the pitch for this show is Alexander, naked and covered in tattoos, standing in Time Square.  All the marketing came from that, from the behind the scenes clips of the tattoos being applied, to the opening credits of the show, they are banking off of that image being intriguing enough to get you to watch it.  That’s it, that’s the show.  I’m willing to bet that a pencilled sketch of that shot was what sold the show.  

The problem is the same problem with all high-concept art, you need to have more than just the concept.  Otherwise, you end up with Snakes on a Plane.  A well executed movie can get away with it (which Snakes on a Plane was not), but a tv show needs to last a lot longer.  There are several, very different, but great ways to stretch out your concept. One is to delve deeply into the concept and what it really means.  Person of Interest is a great example of this, where you forget that it started out being about stopping crimes of “ordinary people,” because it’s turned into how the surveillance system has changed organized crime, terrorism, government oversight, and corporations place in society.  Another good solution is to transition from concept driven to character driven.  Just about every successful superhero has done this.  Daredevil started out as another vigilante ninja character, but the pitch was that he was blind.  That only lasts for so long, though, because eventually you accept that he has other senses that are enhanced and being blind isn’t really an obstacle for him.  The statement “blind ninja” goes from an intrigued “how is that even possible” to “this is the new normal.” The reason he survives as a character was the introduction of all the lore around him, like Elektra, Bullseye, and The Hand.  I’m getting distracted from my point again, but there are ways to make a high-concept piece go long term, even beyond when its concept has run out.

Blindspot is early, it can still go somewhere.  However, they either haven’t decided yet or (more likely) don’t want to reveal too much too soon and are trying to play the delicate balance between telling enough to keep us hooked and not enough to give up the game.  So they’re left with what they’re doing, distraction. 

I liken it to a poorly prepared GM, who shows up at the gaming session with a solid idea of where to go, but not much of an idea of how to get there.  So the GM is forced to improvise and distract, constantly.  You need action, both in a tabletop game or in a TV show.  But the difference between a prepared and an unprepared GM is if the action grows organically or comes out of nowhere.  If it grows organically, the fight makes sense, it can be prepared for.  Important people have body guards, routines, favorite places, all of that can be found by the players (or main characters of your show) and exploited.  But all of that requires a lot of thought on the part of the GM (or writers) as to what the people the main characters are doing, have with them, and who has the element of surprise  It’s a lot of work.  Sometimes a fight can just break out, too.  It’s part of the fun, players get caught unawares. But when the fight doesn’t match the setup, it’s ridiculous; like having some random drunk in a bar be an amazing martial artist.  The hope is there is so much excitement and scrabbling that nobody realizes it doesn’t make any sense.  Used once or twice it can be effective.  Used as a basis of a show, it becomes utterly bonkers.

For instance, in episode 5, the Blindspot crew track radioactive material to a cemetery where they are attacked by a dozenish men with automatic weapons and it comes out of no where.  Everything to that point suggested a small, tightly organized cell, who all knew that they would die of radiation exposure.  But what we got was a large group of heavily armed soldiers in New York City and a shoot out.  Immediately following the shoot out, the CIA turns out to have been there the whole time, but couldn’t help because they can’t operate on American soil.  That doesn’t stop them from minutes later, pulling guns and having a standoff with the FBI.  Why does any of this happen?  I don’t know know.  Does it make sense for a small bomb making cell hiding in New York to have a well equipped fire-team with them?  No.   Why was it not ok for the CIA to shoot the baddies on American soil, to the point where they will let a terrorist with a dirty bomb walk away into downtown New York, but apparently they’re totally comfortable killing a team of FBI agents right there?  These things fundamentally make no sense.  They happen because they make things exciting, they keep people in the moment. 

Blindspot can probably milk this technique for a long time.  It’s sustained other shows, film series, and plenty of table top games. Lost is a masterclass in this technique; every time something seems like it’s about to make sense, introduce something stranger.  But in the end, it becomes unsatisfying.  Once people lost faith in the ability of Lost to provide a good explanation, they stopped watching the show.  And I think that’s going to happen with Blindspot too.  It has to all make sense, and sooner rather than later.  I don’t think you can get 3 seasons out of the tattoos.  

But I’m eager to see how bonkers it gets before I stop watching.




*A term that’s nebulous and difficult to define. Suffice it to say, it’s a show, movie, novel, etc, where everything interesting is described in the pitch and usually has a big name attached to it to make it work.  I do want to unpack it in a separate post though, seeing as a google search has resulted in many people talking about it and every one of them has a different definition.