Star Wars: The Force Awakens

At the Lon­don press screen­ing for Star Wars: The Force Awak­ens, secu­ri­ty mea­sures were such that tick­et hold­ers were instruct­ed to hand over their mobile phones (and any oth­er record­ing devices) to a secu­ri­ty team pri­or to enter­ing the audi­to­ri­um. A num­bered, coloured tick­et was exchanged for the phone, and when the screen­ing fin­ished, that same tick­et was then used to retrieve it. Simple.

Flash for­ward 136 min­utes, and as the silky blue Franklin Goth­ic type­face of the clos­ing cred­its crashed on to the screen (accom­pa­nied with hearty applause), a mad dash to the exit ensued. A mass of bod­ies, still moist from the rain out­side and pressed against one anoth­er, quick­ly formed in the lob­by, with each indi­vid­ual squeez­ing to the front towards the big table of phones.

I wait­ed in the midst of this hud­dle, idly allow­ing the film to per­co­late in the mind. My arm was pressed against the arm of a young blonde man stood direct­ly next to me. I could feel him phys­i­cal­ly shak­ing with excite­ment. He had a dummy’s grin slapped across his yap, appar­ent­ly obliv­i­ous to the vio­lent sway of the scrum. I looked at this man and thought, ​‘ahh, a space nerd on the cusp of pub­lic orgasm. What a love­ly thing that is.’ But then some­thing strange hap­pened. I sud­den­ly realised that it wasn’t the space nerd who was con­vuls­ing with won­der­ment. It was me.

Star Wars is a fran­chise whose cen­tral theme is that your child may not grow up to be the per­son you want him or her to be. Carve away the bul­bous pol­i­tick­ing, and it’s essen­tial­ly human­ist in its out­look: you can build a space­ship to strict spec­i­fi­ca­tions and you can fix it up when it breaks, but you can’t do the same to a per­son. And if you try, it’s high­ly like­ly that you’ll dam­age what you have.

While George Lucas and his erst­while col­lab­o­ra­tors (direc­to­r­i­al avatars?) dili­gent­ly pack­aged this theme with­in their respec­tive ​“episodes”, JJ Abrams is the first to under­stand and demon­strate how hor­ren­dous­ly sad that real­i­sa­tion can be. Maybe ​‘sad’ is the wrong word, as that seems too broad a term to asso­ciate with the spe­cif­ic, tex­tured dynam­ics of this film. Sad is an emo­tion you’d find fug­ging up the ini­tial cycle of Star Wars movies. Here we have melan­choly. And to high­light a sin­gle direc­to­r­i­al mas­ter­stroke in The Force Awak­ens, it’s that Abrams achieves this sus­tained sense of puls­ing wist­ful­ness by cal­i­brat­ing all the per­for­mances to make it look as if the actors have either just been cry­ing, or are on the verge of tears.

This isn’t a shal­low, sideshow tac­tic to arouse a response where none is required. There real­ly is the feel­ing that the char­ac­ters here don’t sim­ply exist in the banal, nar­ra­tive-dri­ven moment, but their faces and their expres­sions speak of his­to­ry, of expec­ta­tion, of sin, of sor­row, of pain, of want­i­ng to switch things up, taste adven­ture and do things with their lives. They are sen­si­tive people.

I guess the impli­ca­tion of obser­va­tions like this is that emo­tion­al flu­en­cy of this for­mi­da­ble type has long been MIA in this galaxy far, far away. The notion that objects evoke feel­ings that might not be instant­ly under­stood, or acknowl­edg­ing that peo­ple – like robots – do pos­sess the pow­er to trans­mit com­plex infor­ma­tion with­out talk­ing to one anoth­er, are just two con­sid­er­a­tions that make this chap­ter bet­ter – a whole lot bet­ter – than any of those that have come before it. Who would’ve pre­dict­ed the attribute that push­es the new Star Wars sequel into the ech­e­lons of the sub­lime is its elab­o­rate human dra­ma? Cer­tain­ly not us…

This ornery Star Wars naysay­er is over­joyed to admit that The Force Awak­ens is lib­er­al­ly strewn with beau­ti­ful moments. Two of the most beau­ti­ful occur when a char­ac­ter comes into phys­i­cal con­tact with an object which sends their mind reel­ing into parox­ysms of bare­ly-sup­pressed delight. Soli­tary scrap scav­enger Rey (Daisy Rid­ley, who real­ly is The One) is propped up against the husk of a burnt-out craft which is semi buried in the sand. She picks up a bat­tered old fight­er pilot’s hel­met and places it on her head. The cam­era lingers. One beat. Two beats. No plot. No action. No words. Sure, it’s a basic visu­al short­hand express­ing Rey’s dor­mant avi­a­trix aspi­ra­tions, but it’s also an extreme­ly poignant touch which empha­sis­es that she’s maybe missed that time of high adven­ture when worlds were forged and destroyed in the sky.

Lat­er on, Han Solo (Har­ri­son Ford, deliv­er­ing his most game and com­mit­ted turn since The Fugi­tive) along with yowl­ing Wook­iee help-meet, Chew­bac­ca, are reunit­ed with the Mil­len­ni­um Fal­con. For just a split sec­ond, Han low­ers his smart guy exte­ri­or as he boy­ish­ly bounds into the cock­pit of his trusty old rust buck­et, a half-smile glim­mer­ing across his face. But is this Han pleased to be back in his old ship? Or is this Ford pleased to be back in his old uni­verse? Both could apply. Some may view these moments as pay­ing craven lip ser­vice to the desires of grease-coat­ed nos­tal­gia trip­pers, but Abrams man­ages to exe­cute them in a way which sug­gests the pass­ing of time and an exquis­ite re-con­nec­tion with a lost moment from the past.

With­out hav­ing to trawl through a list of names, let’s just say that every­one involved in this movie is dyna­mite. There is no Jar Jar. The ensem­ble is well-oiled, there is a neat array of fetish/Steam­punk-inspired aliens milling in the back­drop (some­times just pop­ping in front of the cam­era for no appar­ent rea­son), and there are none of the abysmal racial/​sexual stereo­types that crop up far too abun­dant­ly in the pre­vi­ous episodes of the saga. There’s no visu­al clut­ter, and there are no gaudy CG panora­mas which resem­ble low-rent screensavers.

Anoth­er great thing about the movie is that it doesn’t strain for its pro­gres­sive cre­den­tials, nor does it seem pleased with itself for secur­ing them. It’s not a fem­i­nist film. It’s a nor­mal, enlight­ened film. John Boye­ga has not been cast because he’s black, but because he’s a superb actor with charm in dan­ger­ous abun­dance. Aside from a few men­tions of polit­i­cal buzz­word terms such as ​“Supreme Leader”, the script by Abrams and Lawrence Kas­dan large­ly abstains from draw­ing par­al­lels to con­tem­po­rary geopo­lit­i­cal his­to­ry, which should be music to the ears of those who found the Jihadist para­ble at the cen­tre of Star Trek Into Dark­ness to be supreme­ly dis­taste­ful. So that’s a big plus. The mate­r­i­al does have wider res­o­nance and sig­nif­i­cance, but it isn’t stri­dent in that same way.

The final thing to address here is a sim­ple ques­tion: what is The Force? We have been duped into believ­ing that The Force is a super­pow­er, and it’s down to strength of char­ac­ter whether you chose the light or the dark side. There’s also been the sug­ges­tion that maybe a person’s good­ness is pre­or­dained, that you don’t get to chose which path you go down. Maybe the great­est achieve­ment of The Force Awak­ens is that is assures that The Force isn’t instilled in the souls of a cho­sen few, but is present in every­one, always.

It’s not just a way to make doors open with­out touch­ing them. Or tres­pass­ing into the minds of oth­ers to manip­u­late or dam­age them. But maybe The Force is just a pro­found, evanes­cent human con­nec­tion that tran­scends life and death and is read­i­ly avail­able to every­one with the mox­ie and where­with­al to search for it. Maybe it’s com­plete­ly unten­able, like trem­bling with glee in a crowd­ed room and not real­ly know­ing why.