Ninth in a series: The Dawning of the Age of the ACA: Looking
askance at pop and political culture of 2011–now
[Edit 1/4/16. Edits 1/5/16.]
So I finally got to see this
film, at the same theater complex where I saw Woody’s Irrational Man last August. This time, on a rather cold day (in the
process of changing from too-warm December to weather that is more like early
winter), I made my way in more easily than in the summer, parked in an easily
locatable spot (for me) near the multiplex, bought my ticket, went to get
refreshment at the food court in the nearby Rockaway mall—and glimpsed some men
I saw again hours later, reminding me why this movie for “permanent
12-year-olds” may be just the thing right now: two homeslice-looking guys, at
least one pretty overweight, were hanging around the entrance of the mall near
the food court, chatting between themselves jovially. I wasn’t quite clued to
what they were about, then.
Later, when I headed,
post-movie, to get eats at the food court, I saw the same guys, one looking at
me pointedly (and non-defensively or –menacingly), I knew: these were
undercover cops, on the lookout for possible mayhem on a holiday night. You
didn’t see this in the many old days of this mall’s history.
(That
was me, the crabby old man, talking. Now, a little more lightened-spirit,
a day after a dinner with extended family: For those [like Millennials]
who grew up with Star Wars as an
already-established furnishing of the culture they adopted wholeheartedly [the
way some of us older folk accepted The
Wizard of Oz (1939) as a cultural touchstone when we grew up], the new film
might have caused some trepidation: did they do the new film right? One of my
nephews said he approached the new film, when he saw it, thinking too much, as
he put it; he was ready to criticize it as falling short, but apparently he was
pleasantly surprised by how good it came out, with its entertaining quality and
getting various details of the saga right. And for me, who is less of a fan
[but still familiar with a number of its aspects], the fact that in one viewing
of the film you can be bowled over by all the plentiful story elements and
spectacle, allows you to overlook what may be lacking in it.)
As I said in Part 1, I am not a
true-blue fan of the Star Wars
series, but the story is such that (and if you’ve seen enough of the films)
it’s pretty easy to have enough of a grip on this “world” that you can
understand most of the new installment. There are details of this world I will
never fully care to learn about (not necessarily a reflection on the franchise
in its own right)—such as the premises of the joke about how Han Solo made a
race with a ship in X parsecs; and the minutiae of this world are voluminous
enough, and some of the concepts hokey enough, that you start to joke to
yourself imaginatively, as I did when the film was nearly over, about the
difference between (or the nature of) the “Jedi mind trick” (right term?) and
the “Vulcan mind meld” (from Star Trek). (As for Star
Wars toy tie-ins, as I alluded to in Part 1: see End note 1.)
I think I will make notes in hefty-bullet-point
fashion, since this film is probably understood enough, and respected enough,
by fans that I needn’t try to sum the plot a lot, and if I try, I will be wrong
on some details.
* The little robot that always can.
The first hero we see is BB-8, the robot made from two main, round parts that
seem physically as if they can’t possible move together the way they do. BB-8
will carry a piece of a map that leads to Luke Skywalker, who (hailing from the
middle trilogy) has vanished, this plot bit being the big Macguffin of this film. Interestingly, in a film
opener of a massacre of local villagers by bad guys (including stormtroopers),
actor Max von Sydow is present as the
representative of wizened nobility (somewhat as Alec Guinness functioned in the
first one or two films [of the middle trilogy] and, with a different moral
value, as did Christopher Lee in the prequel set: all elderly [and
European-born] actors lending their veteran talents to these films in what now
seems a traditional exercise for Star
Wars of why-not?/side-part playing [vaguely similar to the likes of James
Stewart turning up in the 1970s Airport
series film]). Von Sydow gets summarily executed, showing he didn’t sign on for
an extended dedication to working on this film through multiple and punishing
locations.
(BB-8, who has a vocabulary of
robot beeps and burps [which at least one of his human associates can
understand], not unlike old R2-D2, can do various things in Swiss Army knife
fashion, and has a sense of humor. Partway through the film, at a point where the
gesture seems just right, he gives a “thumbs up” sign, but by means of some
appendage suddenly sticking out, with a cigarette-lighter-like flame [I think],
which detail got laughter out of the audience I was among.)
* White and black hats, so to
speak. Two sets of people/creatures are trying to find Luke: (1) the
Resistance (a sort of ragtag but earnest bunch), fighting for the good (and for
this trilogy the disappearing world of these folk is the Republic, I think),
and (2) the First Order, a bad bunch with numerous leaders, including the
mystical, Oz-like Snoke, the “Supreme Leader,” who inhabits a murky throne room
of sorts. Among the latter group, Kylo Ren, the most dynamic, on-scene baddie
(played by Adam Driver), who we know is bad because he dresses all in black,
speaks portentously through a distorting mask, kills almost at whim, and
occasionally loses his temper in the ferocious way that we tell three-year-olds
not to do, and which untrammeled temper distinguished Anakin Skywalker as he
devolved darkly into the legendary Darth Vader in the prequels. Kylo also, at
certain dramatic points, takes off his mask, and we see the Darth wannabe underneath,
not terribly different in look from rocker Marilyn Manson (but without the
creepy eye makeup).
Another baddie leader is some
military sort who seems to direct things (in humorless, stiff tones) from a
command center/ship-deck type setting.
* With pleasant music cueing her, a
“Rey” of sunshine appears. The main hero—heroine—of the film is Rey
(Daisy Ridley), a scavenger by trade and attractive female by genetics,
the sort of “power waif” that I remarked on in Part 1; she has the Luke
Skywalker role, the talented up-and-comer from a wasteland planet, for whom the
Hand of Fate (not a franchise character) has exalted things in store, not the
least of which is dexterous use of a light saber, complete with the humming
sound effects that don’t physically seem to go with such a tool.
(How is it that numerous Star Wars characters, evidently not born
on Earth, have British accents? Has the Commonwealth spread that far through
the universe?)
Rey happens upon BB-8, and the
two become an inadvertent team. The third member of the “good-guy” quest-ers is
Finn, a stormtrooper formerly called FN-2187, played by John Boyega. Finn had started getting abruptly and potently disillusioned
with his trained role when in the early village-massacre scene; his getting
blood on his hands from a victim, which he accidentally has wiped on his
helmet, effectively marks him for us as a faceless soldier whose conscience,
nonetheless, is radiantly twanged big-time, who will, before long, become
decisively disaffiliated from the First Order, for which he has worked.
* Who constitutes the united
forces of evil for the trilogies. Another set of bearings I got more
readily, which is the sort of foundational thing that anyone who dares approach
these films with any sympathy should understand: As I jotted down at some point
(possibly derived from some character’s remark), “Sith, Empire, [and] First
Order—all darkness.” Which reflects the fact, I think, that for the three
trilogies, the three respective foci of evil are: for the prequels, the Sith;
for the middle trilogy (the 1977-83 films), the Empire; and for the new trilogy
starting with the 2015 film, the First Order.
* Finn makes a run for it.
Finn breaks out of the First Order’s established location (and command) with
help from a pilot, Poe (Oscar Isaac), who
helms a ship he manages to break free of a tether, with Finn manning the
anti-whatever guns in some gun turret.
They crash-land on Jakka, the
desert planet Rey lives on. The ship crashes in a sandy area that turns out to
be, if we remember a reference made earlier, a quicksand sort of location. Finn
is afraid Poe has sunken into the ground with the smashed ship. He moves
stoically on, and eventually makes common cause with Rey. (An obligatory joke
related to Boyega’s casting, when Finn explains he is with the Resistance, is
made about his skin color; he remarks not all of the Resistance looks like him,
which elicited laughs in the audience. Obviously, the main characters—young
female, Black young male, Hispanic pilot [Poe]—are a pre-production nod to
current demographic concerns, though the harmless self-referential joke about
Finn’s race seems old-fashioned in movie terms, and after all, why should he have worried, when some of the other
creatures [on both sides], some of whom speak English, look like they wouldn’t
have been out of place [on Earth] in a swamp cavorting amid skunk cabbage, or
in some reptile house in a zoo?)
Not to derogate Finn, but: We
find relatively late in the film that Finn is a complex character who promises
interesting plot developments in future installments. Though we can see Finn
has come over to the side of light by leaving the First Order’s regime, and he consorts
in good faith with Rey (in the effort to get BB-8 to his rightful owner, or
such), he still is unsure of his loyalties, for whatever specific reason. At
one point, appearing to backslide a bit, he says he is not of the Resistance
(Rey’s set of allies), not a hero; he is a stormtrooper. Apparently the
training for his old role has planted roots too deep, which in turn sprouts
conflicts/doubts in him.
* A general note, on story density
and nature of the plot. The stuff I’ve just described should suggest
that this film is packed full of incident and plot, and most of the above
happened in maybe the first 25-30 minutes of a 2:15-length movie. There’s
rarely reason to get a bit bored or embarrassed—things keep moving, and the
more deliberately sentimental moments happen rarely and get over with quick.
The plot is a little tangled, and it struck me at times that a good amount of
editing—not a surprise in a film this involved—was done, with results such as:
(1) the way Poe disappears not long after he is on screen (early on), and he
doesn’t reappear until toward the end of the film—and then largely in Top Gun–like shots of him embracing lively
derring-do as a fighter pilot—suggests to me his part in the film might
originally have been greater; (2) numerous coincidences abound, no surprise in
a film of this genre type, but it seemed jarring when, toward the end, all of (1)
Daisy by herself, and (2) Finn with Han Solo and Chewbacca as a separate group,
are on either side of a huge crevasse in a large building or ship, with the
latter group spying her excitedly across the divide. Look, there she is after
all. The next shot, they are with her—which helps usher the story segment
along, but how did the three males (if Chewy is a male) cross that huge divide?
(Chewy makes sounds like a
friendly, grunting dog-cum-gorilla; but has anyone determined what gender he or
she is? Chewy seems able to do things in copiloting a ship, and engage in earthy
camaraderie with Han; and Chewy’s a “crack shot” with whatever gun-like thing
he uses to fend off enemies—all of this as if he’s “one of the boys,” but you
never know….)
* An old spaceship links up new
heroes with old. Another coincidence concerns how Rey and Finn leave
planet Jakku—in a spaceship that she refers to as a piece of junk or the like.
The planet, which series experts might be able to explain in relation to the
overall saga, is a junkyard of sorts, where scavengers ferret out pieces of junk
to sell to an unseemly reclamation facility run by some reptilian sort, just to
get portions of food. (The portions must have enough nutrition, because Rey looks
health enough.) When Rey and Finn, on the run from First Order invaders, have
to flee, they start up the old ship (without a jump or multiple unavailing
crankings on a weak battery)—and Star
Wars was always cool, in fact trademark-making in this way, in having seedy
or junky elements around: ships that were blatantly worse for wear; dim saloons
where shady sorts hung out amid funky music (reggae in this film [End note 2]). The old spaceship that,
as rusted as it was, could still be started up resonated in the 1970s, when
people pursued their livings with question-raising products on the supermarket shelves
and clunkers of cars (with another kind of clunker in the White House).
Then, when the white-hat duo of
Rey and Finn are in space, they are taken in by a larger spaceship—uh oh, what
is this? And it turns out it is Han Solo (Harrison Ford) and old Chewy in what seems to be a sort of
scavenging outer-space vehicle they are in. And Han marvels at finding—what Rey
and Finn have driven—his old Millennium Falcon—the ship he flew in the 1970s
films. And the Falcon becomes a sort of Love Bug that propels heroes for other
lengths of the film. Han in being reunited with his old ship is (on different
levels) like a wrinkled fan of old 1950s Chevys finding a ’57 Bel-Air in a
Cuban backwater and musing appreciatively, “I haven’t seen one of these SOBs in
50 years!”
(In the world of Star Wars, Rey’s low-tech spaceship that,
on Jakku, we initially see her flying around on, a dingy thing hovering quite
close to the ground, seems like technology on the level of a foot-propelled
scooter.)
##
Ford as Han Solo is one of the
true pleasures of this film—not necessarily or simply because he brings back
one of the well-known old characters, while Princess/General Leia (Carrie Fisher) and especially Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) seem more like cameo parts—but because Ford always brought a sort of
insouciant, deal-with-the-shit charm to his part, as if he always felt the film
was (most soberly assessed) a hokey thing, and he was slightly sneering at it,
but sublimating this darker inclination to the streetwise side of Han while
gamely going along with the story. (Ford famously said during making of the
first film to original writer/director George Lucas [possible paraphrase], “You
can write it, George, but I sure
can’t say it!”)
Ford in reprising the role for
the first time since Return of the Jedi
(1983) looks a bit haggard (with his years), but with his muted-cynicism,
warmhearted can-do attitude, he gives a lively example of older-years spirit
for this series, to somehow match the timeworn familiarity of the old (and
sometimes complicating) spaceships, while all of Ridley, Boyega, and Isaac,
being all new to the whole shebang and young, provide the earnest-striver
character traits.
Han (to Chewy, I think) delivers
a pithy but resigned line that was one of the more tickling ones for adults: “Women
always figure out the truth.” (So maybe Han had a fight with the Missus that
morning?)
Anyway, a tiny quibble: aside
from the coincidence of Han Solo happening to pick Daisy and Finn up in his old
ship, how did the Millennium Falcon originally end up on Jakku? Does it matter?
Leia, we find, who now has the
rank of general, inhabits a ship of her own that looks cruddy on the outside.
Seems like the Republic/Resistance has had budget problems.
* All in the family. There
were some family-related details that I didn’t quite get, or that I could not
“check against well-organized prior knowledge of the saga” because I am less
boned-up on Star Wars than many fans.
For instance: (1) Kylo Ren refers to Darth Vader—the half-melted mask of
Darth’s is shown in one shot—as his grandfather. Are we to take this
literally? (2) This may really make me
seem “out of it”: are Han Solo and Leia the parents of Luke Skywalker? I
thought I heard some allusion to this. (3) More weirdly: Did I hear some
reference to Han Solo being the father to Kylo Ren?
* Challenging stops on Rey’s
odyssey. In the sequence where Han, Rey, and Finn are in the saloon,
and get help from a female sort with a kind of fish face, Rey ends up in the
cellar, and happens on Luke’s light saber. In grabbing it, she has visions of
being in another place and amid another tumult. Presumably this presages plot
developments of the future.
The scene where Kylo Ren is
trying to extract info from her head, via ESP or the like, about the piece of
the puzzle concerning Luke, and where she is tied down in a dark room, is
gripping in its way. Ridley’s acting chops are tested throughout this film, and
she provides the most vivid and admirable new character to the franchise.
* Carrie Fisher getting some flak.
I’ve heard there’s been (probably on social media) talk about how Carrie Fisher
shows not to have aged well in this film. Actually, of the three actors from the
middle trilogy who reprise their roles, she comes in second to Ford, and to me
she doesn’t look quite as bad as others have said. Ford may look rather old,
but he nevertheless acts on the youngish side. Fisher seems more old in manner.
Well, there’s a reason, in part
not due to the character (which comes across sounding a little like a timeworn
over-50 type running a small bagel shop in a Catskills hamlet). As is well
enough known, Fisher has suffered from bipolar disorder (old name:
manic-depression); and she has sworn by electroconvulsive therapy (ECT; a.k.a. “shock
treatment”). ECT is controversial, for good reason; but if a patient embraces
it because nothing else works as well, then that’s his or her prerogative. But
a possible consequence of ECT (varying among patients) is hindered memory
(especially short-term for events around the time of the treatment, which is
given with frequency, not in a one-shot deal; and I’ve seen evidence of this in
a friend with whom I associated closely not many years ago).
There was an interview with
Fisher I saw in print (a newspaper) within the past two weeks, and darned if I
didn’t have a bit of a hard time following her answers to the questions (and it
had to be edited for clarity already, too); she seemed rather rusty, jaded, mottled
in expression, and not giving a fig. Aside from this, the fact that she
performs as well as she does in the film (and who knows how many takes she went
through) shows that even an old bipolar patient can still provide a good piece
of the puzzle for a film now earning close to $1 billion.
So, cut her some slack. Or, as ve say vrum alt gontry, “Shut it up,
already!”
##
End note 1. When I had written Part 1, I had just assumed there
would be some Star Wars goodies
available for Christmas-gift use, and figured a BB-8 toy was out there. But I
didn’t know for sure, and wondered. But I was “reassured” when, during the film
previews, there was an ad for Petco (the pet shop) where, it turns out, you
could see among the displayed Star Wars–themed
toys available for your pet, there’s a BB-8 figure.
End note 2. The first film, now partly titled Episode IV, gathered steam in audience interest as 1977 went on. I
distinctly recall some of the music (not the John Williams soaring-orchestra
stuff usually associated with the franchise) plastering the airwaves of WABC,
the AM pop station of the time in the NYC area. A recent review of the 2015
film said the 1977 film (which opened in May) was on marquees (with hit status)
for umpty-ump weeks, I forget the number, but in accordance with this, the
music I heard must have been in about September-October 1977, when we kids were
back on the school bus (on which WABC was the ritually played station). The
music was some funky stuff—which (per all reasonable inferences I made over the
years) was the sort to have been in the film’s bar scene—that featured an
instrument I later inferred was a clavichord, a 1970s-type keyboard instrument
big on funk and other edgy pop music of the early-to-mid ’70s. Strangely, when
I saw the 1977 film years later, perhaps on DVD, the music was changed (for
that scene) to something else (more smoothed-over), I guess a victim to
reediting the early installments of the franchise have been subject to over the
years.
