Alright, it’s been awhile. Surely, the end of December silence must have been understandable (I completely meant to make a post saying we’d be off for the holidays but, well, it was the holidays). The end of the old year and the start of the new also involved a rather delightful trip through Japan’s southern prefectures so neither Kait nor myself were in a position to be making posts.

Derek, as usual, didn’t care.

Since then we’ve had some issues with logins, I’ve returned home and got a lovely cold for my troubles and so the new year has started off with a bit of a sluggish stumble.

But that’s OK because I’m here now to give you my thoughts and feelings and words.

Because I love you.

I originally was not going to post about this subject matter. I felt I had very little to contribute to the global discourse and, frankly, I had little desire to engage with the discussion in the first place. But, alas, the discussion continues and it’s hard to keep out of something that keeps throwing itself in my face.

So today I shall give you my thoughts on the new Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

I’ll cut right to the chase–I did not care for it. Surprise!

This isn’t to say I hate it. That reaction is reserved for my sister. It appears I’ve created a bit of a monster and I couldn’t be any more proud. She gets so angry with mass consumption media now that I hardly need to dredge up some casual ire for the factory produced schlock. Each flaw and inconsistency sticks in her craw like a… well an indigestible insect in the throat of a bird. Shallow characterizations, unnecessary action beats, clichéd conflicts and marginalization of women and minorities are all aspects that stand out in stark relief upon her movie going experience. She longs for the days when she was ignorant and blind.

So, yeah, she hated Star Wars. We both like to joke that the best thing about the movie was the mixed bowl of caramel and salt covered popcorn but it was also the truth. Furthermore, the containers were only five dollars and gave far more popcorn than I could possibly eat which strikes me as a better deal than anything I’d find in Canada.

Well, before you close the browser with fury over our misguided opinions (if you haven’t already), I’d like to discuss what does drag The Force Awakens down. For I’d like to believe even if you truly loved the movie you’d still be open minded enough to recognize its flaws. Nothing is ever perfect and it’s important we point out the good and the bad so that what we attempt next can be an improvement. Right?

So let me make a concession. The Force Awakens is not the worst Star Wars movie to be released. It’s better than the prequels–yes, all the prequels no matter which someone may have found to not be completely awful. I was hoping there would be a greater “race to the bottom” over which could possibly fail the hardest as a piece of cinematic entertainment. The fact that the Force Awakens was so competent was my greatest fear. It’s not a terrible movie, especially not in consideration with the other entries in its franchise: it’s just a boring one.

I think my uncle summed it up the best: “It’s just missing something that made the first so special.”

That something is novelty.

Kind of a strange accusation to raise against a series that hasn’t ever been anything but an homage or pastiche of space operatic science fiction. The original Star Wars drew heavily from such sources as Flash Gordon–a movie which George Lucas wanted to originally direct but was not given the privileged and led to the creation of Star Wars–not to mention practically bragging about ripping from acclaimed directors like Kurosawa and mythology as a whole. It’s a fair argument even if it ignores that all art builds upon itself. It’s also a deflection because there’s a difference between being inspired or borrowing to outright copy.

There were a lot of people that did not like J.J. Abrams Star Trek. I wasn’t one of them. I really enjoyed the reboot and I appreciated its differing direction. There was a dialogue about whether it truly contained the spirit of Star Trek or not but I appreciated the attempt to shine a new light on characters and a series that was over forty years old. If I wanted the old Star Trek movies… well, they’re still there in all their glory untouched and unchanged by Abrams brash reinterpretation. On the other hand, I loathed Into Darkness. Whereas Abrams first movie went to great lengths to untangle itself from the vast swathe of history and baggage of the Star Trek franchise, Into Darkness was nothing but an empty mimicry of one of the series most cherished instalments. It was choked to the brim with inside jokes and cheap copies of once famous scenes.

You can probably guess where this is going.

I feel ultimately my issue with the Force Awakens is my issue with the prequels (outside of the general issue of the prequels being rubbish). There’s this misguided nostalgia that surrounds Star Wars and blinds people to the actual films. I loved them as a child but it’s folly to believe that they’re anything other than just good films. And like all other good films, they are replete with issues and points of weakness. I mean, the special effects for their time may have been great but no one is buying that this guy is anything but a dude in a blue rubber elephant suit. However, the issues run further than poor CGI work and anyone trying to convince you otherwise is hopelessly fanatic.

And yet if you listen to George Lucas discuss his work on the prequels, he spent so much time trying to get them to “rhyme” with the originals. Likewise, it’s painfully obvious that–whether through adoration or fear of angering the masses–The Force Awakens was made to be as boringly close to A New Hope as possible. But this isn’t 1979 and the novelty of A New Hope has long since worn off. It’s flaws, however, have been left in stark relief to its rather dull paced action and simplistic characters. It seems both Lucas and Abrams seemed to miss this point. You can’t keep blindly replicating the same thing over and over again. People will tire of the same high points and the flaws will only grow worse and worse.

The Force Awakens demonstrates this point exactly. Its narrative is near an exact copy of A New Hope with a few cosmetic changes and little else. You can predict the death of characters scenes in advance simply knowing when characters died in the original. So much of the movie painfully draws itself and its parallels back to the first that I was hardly a third of the way into the film wondering to myself, “If I so badly wanted to watch A New Hope, I’d just put on A New Hope.”

If I were a person more invested in the series, I might even be insulted that all the original trilogy managed to accomplish was resetting the franchise back to state zero. All that blathering about bringing balance to the Force, defeating the Empire and whatnot and here we are with no one knowing the Force except some old white hermit and a Nazi-inspired military force that’s hell-bent on being evil and ravaging the galaxy. They even still use stormtrooper armor in case anyone might have difficulty pinpointing the group that wants to tyrannically rule the galaxy. How cute.

And let’s not let Abrams off the hook for trying to pitifully pull heartstrings with Finn the lovable stormtrooper who takes all of ten seconds to get over his traumatic experience of war and the death of his colleague stormtrooper to begin mercilessly gunning down the rest of his co-workers in droves as he busts his best friend forever Poe from jail after knowing him for less than ten seconds. It’s probably because his boss was a woman and drove him crazy, right?

There’s an endless list of these issues but this isn’t a movie that would benefit from ironing out the small details when the fundamentals are so misguided. What they should have done with the sequels was what Abrams did with his first Star Trek. Only now, you don’t have to spend so much time explaining why you aren’t following the same tired three characters for another trilogy of movies since the originals did such a thorough job already. In fact, the only thing that Abrams needed to do was the one thing he completely avoided. He didn’t talk at all about what happened with the end of the original movies. There was no explanation for what happened with the Empire or even what the hell “balancing the Force” is suppose to mean. Clearly, no one knows what to do with either of these major plot points from the originals so they were just sort of trotted out again as the typical stage horse.

Personally, I’d rather see the galaxy in the aftermath of the originals. I’d like to see a new universe that’s far, far away. I want to explore different concepts, themes and characters that are borne from the foundations of prior events and decisions. I’d like to see the struggles of people trying to find their lives in the hollow wrecks of the titanic edifices of days gone by. Why can’t we see the difficulties of a galaxy trying to re-establish order after the head of a tyrannical regime is killed leaving perhaps dozens of warlords in the power vacuum vying to carve out their own slice of territory or even attempting to forge their own throne in the chaos? Why can’t we see the Force taken in a new direction now that it’s been made whole–a Force that’s no longer beholden to these arbitrary, contradictory elements that riddled the originals but perhaps turned into simply a matter of life for some or an ideal by others?

There’s so much potential for what could come next that it’s more than just disheartening to see the old clothes pulled out to be draped over new faces and run through the paces.

It’s boring.