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.