Warning: This article contains major plot spoilers for Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
If I couldn't feel precisely the same sense of transportation that seized me the first time I watched A New Hope when I was 11, The Force Awakens did an admirable job of getting me pretty darn close. But as a life-long Star Wars obsessive, I found my brain working on the movie long after I'd seen it.
While The Force Awakens is a hoot, it has a problem common to big action movies: villains who are not only dull, but also in this case, retreads of old ideas and dynamics. And The Force Awakens has less excuse than many other franchises not to do something great and smart with its core conflict.
The opening crawl for The Force Awakens explains that General Leia Organa (Carrie Fisher) is leading what's known as the Resistance, which for some reason is separate from the new Republic founded in the wake of Emperor Palpatine's (Ian McDiarmid) death at the Battle of Endor.
The original Star Wars movies were never particularly big on explaining the original dynamics of the Rebellion or making it clear whether a defeat at Yavin 4, Hoth or Endor would be a blow from which the Rebellion couldn't recover. But setting up the distinction between the Resistance and the Republic at the beginning of The Force Awakens feels a bit like a nod to the needless complexities that bogged down The Phantom Menace.
It's a political setup that doesn't actually make any sense, but that apparently was necessary to preserve our sense that the Resistance, like the Rebellion, is a scrappy, perpetually imperiled band of outsiders, rather than the military arm of a legitimate government.
General Hux (Domhnall Gleeson) of the First Order.
In a similar way, the setup of the First Order, the fascist organization that has continued the work and aesthetics of the Empire, is clear enough to cause consternation, but not nearly detailed enough to be engaging. The visible head of the First Order appears to be General Hux (Domhnall Gleeson), who gives spittle-punctuated speeches and stalks around in fussy-looking hats.
But while he and Kylo Ren (Girls veteran Adam Driver) operate in public, the real power on the oversized hologram throne is actually Supreme Leader Snoke (Andy Serkis), who, like the Emperor before him, has clearly had something happen to his face and is given to grand pronouncements. The difference? It's possible that he's some sort of alien.
The blessing and the curse of both of these arrangements is that they re-create the dynamics of the first three Star Wars movies exactly. That certainly makes it easier to settle in and enjoy the atmosphere without having to worry about the broad arc of the film. There are major deviations, obviously, from Han Solo's (Harrison Ford) death to the search for Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill). But the game remains fundamentally the same: ponderous, Nazi-like bad guys vs. a clever, insurgent opposition.
Stormtroopers in a scene from the new film, Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
And that's a bit of a bummer. Not to beat a gutted Tauntaun, but the smartest thing the Star Wars Expanded Universe did was to explore what might emerge out of the power vacuum left behind by the deaths of Emperor Palpatine and Darth Vader (David Prowse and James Earl Jones) - and what might happen to the Rebellion when it formed an actual government and had to figure out a way to govern thousands of star systems.
The Force Awakens borrows from the Expanded Universe in other areas. Kylo Ren is a rewrite of Jacen Solo, Han and Leia's son who falls to the Dark Side and kills Luke's wife, Mara Jade. And the power of the First Order's weapon seems like a nod to the Sun Crusher, a dangerous craft that plays a role in some of the Star Wars novels.
But that borrowing doesn't extend to the movie's political dynamics. There's plenty of rich fodder on both sides of the conflict in the Expanded Universe.
On the Imperial side, we have Grand Admiral Thrawn, a military strategist so brilliant that even Imperial racists had to overlook his alien origins, or Ysanne Isard, a former lover of the Emperor's, who preys on the Rebellion's program of caring for aliens by creating a super-deadly biological weapon that affects only non-humans and requires extraordinarily expensive treatment.
And that's not even to mention the Imperial Remnant, a breakaway federation that ended up part of a government that succeeds the New Republic. All of these characters and governments offer a ton of rich, specific storytelling potential that would move the Star Wars franchise beyond a dictatorial old white man super-villain, and beyond a plot rooted in pivotal military clashes.
A scene from the movie Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
And the Rebellion throws off all sorts of great characters, too, from Wedge Antilles, who goes from a minor character in A New Hope to the head of a commando squadron in the Rogue Squadron novels, to Corran Horn, who started out as a Corellian cop and ended up a Jedi Master with connections to a powerful smuggling family. Some of the Rebellion-linked characters from the Expanded Universe might lend themselves better to television shows than movies - Rogue Squadron in particular would make for a terrific episodic series.
Rey (Daisy Ridley) opens up a lot of space for the franchise to explore what the Force means in a new context. But it would really move the franchise forward to see Leia and other officials of the New Republic actually have to run the galaxy and to grapple with power rather than enjoy the flexibility of being in the opposition.
The sins of the political choices J.J. Abrams makes for The Force Awakens are mostly about annoying - if not terribly consequential - incoherence and missed opportunities. But after years of diminishing expectations for Star Wars, The Force Awakens is good enough that it makes me want to start raising the bar higher.
