Final Thoughts on the Film

At the beginning of this review series, I opened with two criteria for how I evaluate a movie. One was how well the movie holds the suspension of disbelief or immersion.

I explained that the suspension of disbelief exists on a sort of gradient. Within this gradient are items like plot holes, character arcs, number of coincidences and contrivances, and I also explained how stakes operate like a game.

Things like worldbuilding, backstory, and soft and hard magic systems explain to the audience the rules of the game, and the tension or stakes of the story are created by the audience anticipating how the characters are going to solve their various problems while operating within those rules.

If the writer begins breaking the rules, the audience will gradually lose interest because the outcome of the story becomes more arbitrary. There’s nothing to guess, no problem for the audience to solve, so why bother paying attention at all?

A writer can get away with violating a few of these rules because no story is perfect. It can’t be. But when the mistakes start to stack up, making those mistakes appear to be laziness on the part of the writer, thus the audience will begin to lose interest in the story itself, and then they’ll do one of two things: they’ll either grow bored or they’ll start analyzing the story’s structure.

When either one happens, the immersion has been broken, but the second one is especially problematic because people tend to see what they’re looking for. If the audience begins looking for the mistakes, it will find them.

The second criterion is the effect that the movie in question has on the movies that follow it, whether that be the following movies for a franchise or a particular director or production company.

Sometimes a bad movie can look successful because the one preceding it was successful or because the director or production company has a good reputation, but after the audience has seen the film and failed to enjoy it, the later film suffers from the damage done by its predecessor.

 Star Wars: The Force Awakens is interesting because, in a way, it almost breaks my model. This film was successful by every conceivable metric, though it broke all the rules of decent storytelling.

At the time, those who noticed the issues were in the minority. Perhaps it was because the fans had high hopes for Star Wars, but really, I suspect it was because Abrams did what he’s known for: he teased a number of interesting mysteries that later had no payoffs.

I can’t speak for his motives—though I love to try—but it has been speculated that the reason for this approach was that Disney attempted a new model of storytelling. One director would start a story, then they would pass the baton to the next director, then the next director would pass that baton to the next.

If this was the case, then Abrams may have felt justified in leaving so many things open-ended, but no one could’ve predicted the chaos Rian Johnson would inflict on the trilogy going forward. Thanks to him, it’s hard to say if that model will continue to be used.

However, I bring this up to offer some kind of excuse for Abrams, but it isn’t much of one because the problems with this film run deeper than a number of dropped plot points.

The real issue was his eagerness to recreate A New Hope beat-for-beat. It’s as if he saw the movie, took note of the scenes, but gave no thought to how they connect.

He wanted something that could blow up planets, so he made something that would blow up planets without considering the prior worldbuilding or mechanics that would make Starkiller Base work within the Star Wars universe.

He wanted a Jedi and a Sith knockoff, but he didn’t understand the underlying philosophy of the Force as George Lucas presented it. He wanted an audience insert, but he didn’t understand that George Lucas formed his protagonist based on a very specific character model often found in traditional western fantasy.

In my opinion, his attitude seems to reflect the attitude of Disney itself. They both wanted the outcomes, but neither did the work required to make that happen, and this is probably because they felt they didn’t have to. I believe their attitude was that if they could just recreate the aesthetic, that would be enough. The writing was secondary.

And that brings me to my final point. Abrams’ treatment of the original characters was just outright disrespectful. People went into the films expecting some, if not all, the characters to die while passing the baton.

I wasn’t in favour of that, but the attitude at the time seemed to be that this was inevitable. The characters’ deaths weren’t the issue. The issue was how they went. Han regressing to a state worse than where the audience found him in A New Hope was a slap in the face to any fan of Han.

The way Leia, Luke, R2-D2, Chewie, and C-3PO were sidelined to give the new protagonists and some bizarre mysteries more screen time was disrespectful. And here’s another detail I failed to mention in the other reviews that goes to further prove my point. R2-D2 and C-3PO were classic Rosencrantz and Guildenstern archetypes.

The droids were meant to act as peripheral observers to all the important events. Abrams had his droid, BB-8, but he didn’t even understand how Lucas was using his robots!

All these things led to the disaster known as The Last Jedi, so while The Force Awakens didn’t destroy the Star Wars Franchise, it led to the movie that destroyed the Star Wars Franchise.

Now, I would argue that Rian Johnson still shares the majority of the blame, but Abrams did his part. The only excuse I can offer him is what I mentioned before. He might’ve been operating under this passing-the-baton mentality, and he may have even been hired because he has a talent for setting things up. I can’t say for sure, but he did such a terrible job with this movie that it’s hard not to offer him something.

Lastly, I want to give another shout-out to Mauler. While I didn’t agree with many of his thoughts on the movie, it was very nice to have somebody who would slow this film down scene by scene.

I watched this film countless times, but it hits its viewers with so much nonsense that it was difficult to catch everything. So, I want to thank him for his Unbridled Rage review of this movie and his five-part series on The Force Awakens, which I highly recommend.

I plan to begin reviewing The Last Jedi, which, based on the criteria I’ve presented, is comfortably not only the worst Star Wars movie, but also the worst film of all time. I intend to explain why in the next review.