Star Wars: The Force Awakens: Further Thoughts

I don't think it should be a big surprise that I have more thoughts on this latest of Star Wars movies. The film has only been out for a few days, and some of my friends who have not yet had the chance to watch it are already having major plot points and elements spoiled by, frankly, pretty inconsiderate people. I know that there's a whole investigation into the idea that spoilers are even a bad thing - that there are studies that say people enjoy a movie or other piece of media if they already know where it's going. But my philosophy is that, while that might be the case, every subsequent watch of the movie will be "spoiled," so even if the "unspoiled" version is worse, viewers should still be given the opportunity to have that one unique experience. So that's why I'm being careful to provide a spoiler warning here and also give a nice big block of text dedicated to spoilers in case someone catches the first part of this post on the mobile version or something like that.

Right, are we good? Ok.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens

As I said in the previous article, I was at the target age when the Star Wars prequels were released. And in fact, my initial reactions to them were positive. But as time went on and I reexamined them (and, yes, had things pointed out to me,) I realized that they were really mangled movies - with some inventive visuals and a sweeping score by the consistently excellent John Williams, but flawed deeply in both writing and direction. I don't want to go too hard on George Lucas, because ultimately Star Wars is his thing, but it's clear that without collaborators who could really challenge his decisions and force him to re-work elements that weren't working, we wound up with probably the most disappointing (not worst, disappointing) movies ever.

So when Lucas sold Lucasfilm, with all its properties, to Disney, there was actually a kind of hope in the air. Disney, for all its corporate greed (and make no mistake, they are going to make an obscene amount of money on Star Wars merchandise now that they can make as many Star Warses as they want,) does actually have a good company feel for strongly-made entertainment. We've seen it in their Marvel movies (some better than others, but even the least impressive of them - I'm looking at you, Thor-centric movies - are still a good watch,) and now they're trying out the ultimate blockbuster franchise - a series that people feel deeply passionate about.

So, before I get into HEAVY spoilers, I'll just give a very simple opinion of Episode VII: The Force Awakens. It was good. If you like Star Wars, this is a worthy addition to the series.

Now let's jump behind the cut so we can talk about things in private.

SPOILERS AHEAD.

The Perhaps-Impossible Task of Evaluating the New Star Wars Movie Accurately

The Star Wars prequels came out pretty much when I was almost perfectly in the age-bracket for maximum impact. I was in 8th Grade when The Phantom Menace was released, and the other two prequels came out when I was in High School. The thing is, at the time, I thought the prequels were good. Over the years, though, I've reevaluated them. There's definitely a kind of pop-culture mob mentality, and I can't claim that I haven't been influenced by it. But the criticisms of the prequels do hold water - there are some serious story structure flaws, some strange choices about the arc of that story, etc.

The thing is, why do we care? There are plenty of bad movies that come out, and we usually just kind of forget about them.

Star Wars is the object of a cult-like worship. I bet that if you counted all the people in the world for whom Star Wars provides a real emotional response, you'd have enough to count as a major world religion. I won't really go into why that's the case, though it's clearly got something to do with a combination of iconic story-weaving and some of the most relentless marketing and merchandising the world has ever seen.

Alex Guinness, one of the greatest film actors of all time, famously disparaged the movies as being silly and frivolous, and while he was smart enough to know that they'd be a success (rather than take a normal paycheck for the firm movie, he opted for a percentage of its profits, and thus made more money than a normal person would be able to spend in a lifetime.) It's true that the original trilogy was not terribly nuanced, and when you look back at some of it - mainly the twists of Darth Vader being Luke's father and Leia being his sister - it doesn't really hold up that much. Guinness managed to sell his "from a certain point of view" excuse for flat-out lying about Luke's father, but only because, as I said, he was one of the greatest film actors of all time.

The thing is, Star Wars has become such an ingrained part of pop culture that it's passed on from generation to generation. My dad, though not nearly the film nut that I am, was the age I am now when the original Star Wars came out, and despite usually turning his nose up at a lot of low culture and post-modernist spins on it, he was the one who got me to watch those movies when I was little (my mom, on the other hand, is much more willing to dirty her hands in pop culture's underbelly. She's the one who like Tarantino.)

The thing is, because it's so built up in our minds, one of two things will happen - or, more likely, both. The first is that we might see what we want to see - just as a 13-year-old me was convinced that Phantom Menace was going to win Best Picture at the Oscars. There's a ton of positive-response bias in a lot of media these days because there's a massive marketing machine to encourage it. We're in an age where hype is all that matters, and to a great extent, the fans are capable of drumming it up on their own, but I suspect there's a ton of money behind making it look like people are excited about things - if you see someone excited about a piece of media you have some interest in, you're probably going to get more excited about it.

The flipside, though, is the kind of "hipster credentials" where thinking something is bad is the way you prove that you're better. Sometimes this will come in the form of a backlash against the aforementioned ultra-hype, but it soon becomes its own self-reinforcing beast that is just as capable of obscuring the truth about a piece of work.

Now, the huge caveat to all of this is that "truth" when it comes to opinions about art is obviously subjective (and yes, I consider anything from experimental variations on filmic form to big blockbuster popcorn-sellers art - something can be crass and still art, it just becomes crass art.) No matter how good a movie is, some people will genuinely hate it, and no matter how bad a movie is, some people will genuinely love it.

After the premiere, there have been a lot of people saying favorable things about the movie, but you have to take all of this with a grain of salt - when it comes to celebrities, for example, they've got to tow the line, as it helps their personal brand if they don't alienate or anger a super-powerful film studio that could make or break their careers. Film critics I might pay more attention to, but critics are often wrong about things, and while they are more practiced at maintaining perspective on these things, they are still human and subject to the biases that can come with the media landscape.

I can only speak for myself, but here's what I'm looking for out of the Force Awakens:

A simple story that makes sense. Lucas tried to add political intrigue to his prequels, but while that can make for really good drama, it does naturally lead to complicated plots that a good writer needs to communicate cleverly. Shocking twists can be great, but they suffer from diminishing returns. You need some big turns throughout a plot, but a reversal and a twist are not the same. You can only upend the reality that audiences thought they were living in every so often, or they'll never get invested enough in the status quo to be shocked when that rug is pulled from under them. 

Smart Character Work: Each character needs to be protagonist of his or her own story. Those stories should be rich, but they don't need to be complex, and we don't have to show their entire stories. A villain often works really well if we only get brief glimpses of his or her story. Characters can have simple goals - basically, a goal "I want this in my life" and a clear objective to achieve that goal "I will go there and do this."

The right aesthetic: this I know they can pull off because I've seen the trailers. While I think the role they played in the prequels' failings has been overblown, it's true that episodes I, II, and III didn't really look like Star Wars, given how they were filled with all that slick CGI and environments that had none of the "used future" feel that we associate with the series. But yeah, I'm not too worried about this.

Make these movies count: Probably my biggest worry about JJ Abrams directing the movie is that it might be too reverential to the source material. Star Trek Into Darkness purported to be a new Star Trek movie, but in practice it felt more like a bunch of fan-remakes of scenes from Wrath of Khan. We're going to know it's Star Wars - it has X-Wings, TIE Fighters, Star Destroyers and Light Sabers. This should be a new story, and not just a repeat of the old ones. If you want to build on the legacy of the series, you have to go somewhere that the older entries don't already occupy.

Rewatching Batman Begins and the Dark Knight

The other day, I had a lot of free time and was fairly bored, and found myself craving some Batman. Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy has been hugely influential. Pairing with the James Bond reboot in Casino Royale, it was a big part of the popularization of the "dark and gritty reboot" trend that has been so popular the last ten years. Batman Begins also helped to kick off the trend of superhero movies that the studios take seriously, though it worked alongside Bryan Singer's X-Men movies and Sam Raimi's Spiderman ones. I watched Batman Begins and the Dark Knight. I didn't watch the Dark Knight Rises because we don't have it on DVD (I didn't hate it as much as a lot of people seemed to, and actually thought it handled Catwoman and Robin about as well as I could expect the series to do so.)

The funny thing, of course, is that Batman had already sort of had its "dark and gritty" reboot in the form of Tim Burton's 1989 film, coupled with his follow-up Batman Returns. As a kid who was born in 1986, the strange swept-back Batmobile with a jet engine turbine at the front is the definitive version of the vehicle (despite the fact that: confession, I haven't actually seen either of Burton's Caped Crusader works.)

Burton's Batman movies were darker and grittier, but only in comparison to the previous on-screen version of the character - the absurdly campy 60s TV show and movie starring Adam West.

Of course, Batman is such an old and established character as well as being incredibly iconic that he's gone through some very different incarnations. Batman is sort of the official #2 most quintessential superhero, and the general pop culture consensus is that he's more interesting than Superman, thanks in part to the limitations on his powers (he's a mere mortal, albeit a very rich, very smart, and very skilled one) and also due to the fact that many of his villains are as iconic as he is (the Joker has got to be the most iconic supervillain, with apologies to Mr. Luthor.)

Tim Burton's Batman movies were kinda-sorta continued with two additional movies by Joel Schumacher (to my great shame, I have actually seen these ones.) But while Burton inevitably gave us a heightened Gotham that borrowed from German Expressionism and his own whimsical visual styles, Schumacher's movies were garish and campy in a way that, in the ironic 90s, might have seemed self-aware at the time, but are generally just remembered as awful (the latter of the two had Arnold Schwartzenegger making tons of ice puns as Mr. Freeze.)

There's a much larger discussion about how pop culture changed so tremendously between the 90s and the 00s, but much as we saw a transition from campy invisible cars in the later Pierce Brosnan Bond films (ok, that was technically 2000, but I think we can think of a major event in 2001 that marked the clear line between the decades, culturally) to the Bourne Identity, a campy Batman was not what audiences wanted. (Re: Brosnan as Bond, I actually thought he made a great James Bond, it's just that only the first of his four Bond movies, Goldeneye, was good - largely because it was a direct reaction to another massive cultural shift, i.e., the end of the Cold War.)

In the 00s, audiences weren't really content to take campy stuff and care about it. The conception of Batman Begins was that it would take the basic outline of the Batman comics and build something that functioned somewhat more along the rules of the real world. Realism might be a stretch, but the movie tried to justify things in more concrete ways. One interesting consequence of that is that some very important, iconic villains only brush against their more over-the-top comic book inspirations. Scarecrow never really identifies himself as such. The only time we really see him looking like a full-on supervillain is while a little boy who is suffering from his hallucinogen (actually Jack Gleeson, who would later brilliantly play the detestable Joffrey Baratheon on Game of Thrones) imagines him as something far scarier than he is.

In the Dark Knight, this goes farther. Harvey Dent is mostly heroic through the majority of the movie, but after he suffers the horrific burns that make him into Two Face, he goes on one rampage before he dies. Not every villain has your standard supervillain schemes in these movies, and while his in-universe status as a villain only lasts a day or two, he still largely lives up to the legacy of his character.

It is interesting, though, watching the two movies back to back, and seeing how different they are. The Dark Knight Rises is often singled out for being disappointing compared to the first two, and the Dark Knight is typically held aloft as the pinnacle of the series. It's true that Heath Ledger's Joker was a revelation, and there's a certain added mystique to the role given that he died so soon after (and it's possible that his preparation for the role is what indirectly led to his untimely death.) But I actually think that my opinion of the two movies is more even than I would have previously thought.

For one thing, Gotham in Batman Begins feels a little more otherworldly. Granted, part of the mission statement for the series was to take the comic book universe and make it feel more like the real world. Gotham of the Dark Knight feels very much like a modern American city. I believe it was mostly shot in Chicago, and you could even imagine simply saying that's where it was and not really changing the plot all that much (though clearly Gotham is meant to be New York. Actually, as a side note, for a long time I thought of Gotham as DC's version of New York while Metropolis was its Chicago, but a couple years ago I found out that actually, they're both supposed to be New York, and on some maps they're even right next to each other, across the Hudson from where the real New York City would be.)

Batman Begins has a lot of action that takes place in The Narrows, and Arkham Asylum within there. This strange and twisted shantytown is perhaps not what you'd expect to see in a modern American city, but it sort of acts as the platonic ideal of urban misery. Arkham Asylum is a crumbling, rotting building that seems squeezed into its surroundings, and adds to the spookiness of the movie (appropriate, given that it's the only one in which Scarecrow shows up for more than just a brief fun cameo.)

By contrast, the Dark Knight's Gotham is slick. The streets are straights and wide, and the skyscrapers are made of glass and steel. There are a couple reasons for this, one being that it deals more with high society. Far more of the major players in the second film are members of Gotham's elite and government. But it also creates a starker contrast with Ledger's Joker, who is far grungier and grimier than any previous incarnation we've seen. Not only does he have threadbare purple jackets, messy, only partially-dyed green hair, and make-up that it looks like he put on once and simply never washed off, allowing it to gradually rub off as the movie goes on, but his wide grin is accomplished not by showing a bunch of teeth, but by having horrible-looking scars on his cheeks (that painfully remind me of the eczema I used to get on my upper lip when I was a kid.)

But one of the other strange things to note about the series is how things have changed since then. Batman Begins is now ten years old, and the "dark and gritty reboot" ran its course into ridiculousness. X-Men, Spiderman, and Batman Begins opened the door for Marvel to become its own studio (that was very swiftly and probably wisely bought by Disney.) The Marvel films have managed to take the best of both worlds in comic book stories. "Nerd Culture" has become mainstream, and thanks to that, not only are there more talented artists willing to work on these projects, but the studios can push farther into the realm of heightened sci-fi and fantasy without the fear of losing the audience.

Mind you, the Dark Knight trilogy is not without a sense of humor, but it does take a very serious attitude to the subject matter, carefully dancing around or slicing out anything too ridiculous from the comics. But the Marvel films have leaned in, abandoning the campiness that ruined the Schumacher era Batman and replacing it with earnestness.

But the consequence of this is that a lot of films still following in the Dark Knight's footsteps are now teetering off of the edge of ridiculousness, not because of quasi-self-aware camp, but absurd bleakness. The Dark Knight can get away with being a bit angsty, given that angst over his parents' death is basically the primary motivation for Batman to be a superhero. But when this dark and gritty quality was used for Superman in Man of Steel, it seemed like a betrayal of his character.

DC is trying to create their own consistent cinematic universe, and certainly their company has some very important properties that could work. After all, as good as any of the Marvel superheroes are, Superman, Batman, and arguably Wonderwoman are the triumvirate at the top of the iconic superhero list.

But I think that it's clear that we're at a point where people want to and largely have moved past the Dark and Gritty era. Even Marvel is going to have to evolve if they want to keep this train rolling. Batman Begins opened a big door for these sorts of movies to enter the cinema, but I think that we're evolving past it by now.