Leia Hugs Rey

Last time, I discussed whether the fight scene between Kylo Ren and Rey was fair and whether it was good. Hint: it wasn’t either. That scene is a terrible scene all around. But the madness doesn’t stop. Rey returns to the wounded Finn and begins crying. Then Chewie finds them both in the forest.

How he found them as quickly as he did is yet another mystery box with nothing inside it. He just found them, moving on. By the way, Poe blew up the chamber keeping the sun contained inside the planet, so now the planet is about to explode. Chewie, Poe, and the Resistance fleet escape just before the Starkiller Base becomes a sun.

When watching the movie, I thought this was just an explosion, but apparently that wasn’t the case. Learning this after watching the film did not help the scene’s believability. I’m not a scientist, but since a sun is many times bigger than a planet, I had questions. Could a writer make this work? Perhaps, though I’m not sure how he or she could explain the mechanics of this without a tremendous amount of exposition that would be unlikely to relate to anything else in the script, and just keeping the scene for the sake of the visual might leave the viewer more focused on the how than the visual itself, so I’m not sure the visual alone was worth the trouble.

Then probably the worst moment in a long list of horrible moments happens. As the crew lands and celebrates its victory, Leia walks right past Chewie and hugs Rey. Time is a funny thing. When I first watched the film in theaters, I was angry about the death of Han Solo. That still upsets me, but the moment that fills me with a quiet disgust, something I would suggest is much deeper than anger, is this brief scene.

Now, Abrams admits this scene was a mistake, but his reasoning for why it was a mistake makes the whole thing worse. He’s not upset because Leia hugging Rey makes no sense since the two have literally never met. He says his mistake was keeping Chewie in the shot. Perhaps it was because it made what Disney was trying to do a little too obvious!

Passing the torch to a new cast was going to be inevitable when rebooting a franchise decades after the original film. But the lack of respect for the original characters in this trilogy is astounding. My viewpoint on this is straightforward. It doesn’t matter that Disney bought the rights to those characters from Lucas.

Countless fans loved those characters. Countless fans were about to give this company over a billion dollars. The very least Disney could’ve done was tip its hat to the characters who were going to be their meal ticket before removing them in favor of new blood. This scene demonstrates Disney’s eagerness to cash in.

The writers couldn’t even take the time to have Leia and Chewie hug—you know, since they were lifelong friends and everything. And forget allowing Carrie Fisher the screentime needed to introduce herself as Leia before hugging the protagonist! This scene was a pure slap in the face to any fan of the original trilogy.

Frankly, this scene reeks of low-brow fan fiction, the kind of story where a newbie author elevates their own insert at the expense of the other characters. I’m convinced that Rey is really an audience insert, but even the audience would like to hear, “Hi. I’m Leia,” before Leia hugs them.

At least, after this scene, there are a few seconds of Chewie mourning the loss of his friend. I won’t say it was nice, because the scene was very depressing, but it was needed. However, the writers can’t have us dwelling on Han for too long because, after all, that pesky old smuggler is dead, so they hit the audience with more stupid. R2-D2 wakes up. Not sure how. Not sure why.

But the robot wakes up, and it just so happens to have the rest of the map leading to Luke Skywalker. But even this scene is odd because, in the middle of it, C-3PO says how much he missed R2, but only after the big reveal. It wasn’t a big deal, but I still wondered why they didn’t have him say that before the Luke Skywalker moment? Why didn’t C-3PO react to the possibility of finding Luke? The line felt forced, and this was jarring enough to take me out of the scene.

But not as jarring as what happens next. For some incomprehensible reason, the Resistance decides that Rey should go find Luke. Why not Leia? Why not R2-D2? Why not anyone who has a past with him? But no. It just has to be Rey because Rey is the audience insert, so it just has to be that way.

Anyway, Rey tells Finn, who is still unconscious, goodbye, then she, Chewie, and R2-D2 fly off in the Falcon and find Luke alone on an island. Once again, Rey, for no real reason, must go and meet Luke alone at the top of this island. Just ignore the fact that it would’ve made far more sense for Chewie to go, since they have a history together. No, instead it has to be the random girl Luke has never seen before and has no connection to whatsoever.

Rey reaches the top of the hill and sees Luke looking out over the horizon. He turns around and she offers him his lightsaber. The two stare at each other, saying nothing, and the movie ends.

What a mess! It’s strange because the first half of the movie has its problems but is mostly enjoyable. Star Wars: The Force Awakens is much like the frog in the kettle. The story gradually grows worse and worse until the frog is boiling to death in stupidity.

Strangely, Maz Kanata really is the dividing line. Once she arrives, the movie stops being mostly solid with sporadic plot holes and just starts rapid-firing disjointed story beats almost minute by minute. It becomes very hard to follow. But the worst part of it is that the cynicism becomes most apparent toward the end of the film.

The whole thing feels rushed, implying that Disney was far more interested in turning Star Wars into its own thing than it was interested in paying any sort of respect to George Lucas and the world he built. I plan to give a final analysis of the movie in the concluding review.