So…STAR WARS. My thoughts.

I’m figuring that pretty much everyone who is going to see it has seen it already. So off we go. There are copious spoilers attached.

I have seen any number of pompous diatribes deriding the film because of many parallels to the first one. There is, I suppose, some validity to the observances. In both films, a youth on a desert world comes into the possession of a robot that is carrying a piece of information that has to be carried directly to a rebellion movement because they have space ships, flying vehicles and light sabres, but not email. This young individual is strong in the Force and uses that ability to attack the Empire/First order, but watches helplessly while a father figure is cut down by someone he was once close to. And the entire film climaxes when the best pilot in the galaxy blows up a massive planet destroying weapon belonging to the Empire/First order. If anything, there are far more parallel story beats to “A New Hope” than there were between “Star Trek: Into Darkness” and “The Wrath of Khan,” and people decried the resemblances relentlessly.

Yet there are sufficient differences between the source material and the newest film to satisfy me, really. First and foremost, which no one seems to have pointed out: the dialogue is better. Much better. Lightyears better. Of the previous six films, the only one with good dialogue was “The Empire Strikes Back,” and this dialogue is on par with that. There are moments of genuine levity, and there is no dialogue evoking wretched hives of scum and villainy that make you say, “Only Alec Guiness could have sold THAT line.” And the characters are very different. They’re better written, better acted, and have intriguing back stories that we are convinced (or at least I am) will slowly be revealed as the story progresses (let’s remember we didn’t find out about Luke’s parentage until the end of the second film, so I’m content to wait to discover how Rey does what she does.)

Ah, Rey. The character decried as a Mary Sue simply because she is at Luke’s level of force manipulation by the end of the film rather than taking three movies to get there. Because how riveting does it sound to watch her go through the exact same voyage of discovery at the exact same pace? Screw that. We know what a trained Jedi can do now. So let’s just get to it. It took Luke three films to be able to defeat the bad guy. She did it in one. That makes no sense! How could she defeat Kylo Ren? Because he’s not on Vader’s level and he was suffering from a crossbow blast to his gut, nimrods, that’s how. Do we have to spell out everything?

Who is Rey? Well, before the film opened, I opined that Kylo Ren was Luke’s son and Rey was Han and Leia’s daughter. Got that exactly backwards. Although yes, they haven’t established that she’s Luke’s daughter, but they’ve sure hinted at it pretty strongly. She’s wearing his old fighter helmet and she has an old doll that looks like fighter pilot Luke. I figure her dad is either Luke or Wedge Antilles.

All I know for sure about Rey is that my teen daughter absolutely adores her and wants to role play as her, and that’s really all that matters because back in 1977 thirteen year old boys were all putting on their karate outfits and using flashlights as light sabres. Every generation needs its filmic heroes, and if Daisy Ridley’s Rey gets the job done, I’m fine with that.

We don’t know anything about Finn’s background, or Poe’s background, but that’s okay as well. “Star Wars,” which simply started off as a “Flash Gordon” rip-off that many contemporary directors thought was an appalling waste of Lucas’s time, was always less about the environment than it was about the characters anyway. They trusted the Force implicitly, so much so that when Luke shut off his targeting computer during the climax of “A New Hope,” the rebel alliance just took it on faith that he knew what he was doing rather than reacting the way you and I would have: ordering him to stop screwing around and turn the damned computer back on.

So overall “The Force Awakens” is a big sweeping attempt to get back to basics. Yes, the prequels didn’t have a single planet destroyer to blow up, but they didn’t have anything else to recommend them either. That’s partly because Abrams went back to basics, rendering this film with practical effects whenever possible, as opposed to Lucas so embracing CGI that even damned Yoda became freaking computer animated instead of being a puppet. That’s why the look and feel of this film gives us the warm fuzzies: because it FEELS like a Star Wars movie in a way that none of the prequels did. There wasn’t even lens flare.

There is also much discussion about Snoke. No one is saying what I’m saying, which is that Snoke is quite simply the worst name for a villain ever. EV-er. A villain’s name should fill you with fear, a sense of dread. Darth Sidious. There’s a name. Sounds like insidious. Darth Vader. Sounds like invader. Snoke? What the hell? Even putting “Darth” in front of it wouldn’t help. There is also much discussion about whether he is actually a giant. Why? When Vader first spoke with the Emperor’s hologram, HE was a giant. They were just evoking that. Personally I would love it if Snoke were three feet tall. An evil Yoda. That would be freaking hilarious.

Was there anything I disliked? Honestly, yes. The music. That’s right, the music.

Hum the “Star Wars” theme. You know it. Hum Luke’s theme. Han and Leia’s theme. Hum the Darth Vader march. Remember the music when the Falcon flies through the asteroids? Hell, the music of the big battle with Darth Maul? These were all tunes that you came out of the theater with them seared into your cerebral cortex.

Now hum ANY John Williams signature theme from “The Force Awakens.” Go ahead. I’ll wait.

If you can, you are way ahead of me, because I’ve got nothing. Rey, Finn, Kylo Ren: I can’t pull up any musicals cues directly associated with these characters, and I’ve seen the movie twice. When Williams evokes previous musical cues–Han and Leia’s theme when they reunite–they pop right out at you. But if there are musical themes for any of the new characters, I simply cannot perceive them. I suppose that’s a failure on my part, but to me there’s simply nothing there. I shouldn’t have to sit down and listen to the soundtrack with each piece labeled so I can pick them up in the film. I don’t know what the hell went wrong with Williams in this film, but I’m hoping that it’s fixed by the next film.

As for me, I know what I want to do while waiting for the next film: I want to write a comic book about the adventures of Han Solo and his teen son, Ben. I want it to be that Leia is worried about the way the kid is developing and Han says he’s gonna take his thirteen year old son out on some adventures to the Outer Rim, and turn out twenty pages of excitement every month as Han and Ben go exploring and try to reconnect. Which you know ultimately won’t happen, but it would be a great ride.

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