![]() As The Resistance plots how to blow it up (a rehash of the Death Star plan of attack in A New Hope and Return of the Jedi), one of the fighter pilots shouts out almost mockingly, “It’s another Death Star!” Either Han or Leia then quips, “Where’s the weak point?” Even the characters in the film seem to be saying, “Christ, a third time? Wasn’t this freakin’ silly enough when we re-used this plot device in Jedi?”ĭeath Star 3.0 is lazy, sure, and it makes all the other original trilogy references seem glaring (it’s a fish head in your soup–suddenly all the other ingredients taste like fish head), but maybe there’s some meta-commentary on Star Wars here. There’s always an underlying question of “How much is too much?” when it comes to homages, and with The Force Awakens it seems like the “too much” threshold is crossed in the second half once we see The Starkiller Base. It’s why The Wrath of Khan (inspired in part by A Tale of Two Cities and Moby-Dick, among other works) will always be better than Star Trek Into Darkness (a joyless rehash of The Wrath of Khan)– Wrath of Khan gives itself room to play with its pastiche, which yields something new. All creators are swayed by their influences, but the work usually suffers when slavish devotion to influences becomes more important than using those influences to create something new. His two Star Trek films were full of fan service and repeats of familiar ideas, and Super 8 was a riff on Steven Spielberg’s early output and the misfit kid movies of the 80s. The Force Awakens follows a lot of A New Hope, which in some ways confirms many of the biggest fears fans had about Abrams being on board. I missed some, and there are loads of allusions to Empire and Jedi as well, but you get the picture. And yes, there is a Wilhelm scream, and someone has a bad feeling about something. There are fan service-y moments throughout as well, from the hologram chess board to the remote training ball to mentions of a trash compactor. Both movies feature the lightsaber death of a fatherly figure (Obi-Wan, Han Solo) at the hands of a bad guy in black (Darth Vader, Kylo Ren). Both movies have a weaponized planet (The Death Star, The Starkiller Base) that blows stuff up real good before getting blowed up real good. Both movies have their own cantina scene (Mos Eisley Spaceport, Moz Kanata’s bar). They leave the desert planet in The Millennium Falcon. The droid wanders a desert planet (Tatooine, Jakku) and is eventually found by an unassuming person (Uncle Owen and Luke, Rey). Important information is stashed inside of a beep-booping droid (a distress message to Obi-Wan Kenobi in R2-D2, a map to find Luke Skywalker in BB-8). The similarities between A New Hope and The Force Awakens are plentiful. The nadir might be 2006’s Superman Returns, a sequel that was basically a joyless rehash of Richard Donner’s 1978 film. Jurassic World was a middling model of this, albeit a highly lucrative one. The better models of this are Creed, which builds off the Rocky movies to tell its own story, and Mad Max: Fury Road, which uses recurring elements like the other sequels in the franchise. We’ve seen a few soft reboots and sequels this year that take familiar elements from earlier entries in a series to move in their own directions. ![]() Then again, The Force Awakens isn’t just a set-up and sequel, it’s also a Star Wars movie about Star Wars movies. Abrams’ models for The Force Awakens were clearly A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back, and The Return of the Jedi. If George Lucas’ models for the first Star Wars were Akira Kurosawa, John Ford, and Flash Gordon, J.J. Yet the new characters seem a little hemmed in by the familiarity of the plot, which borrows the majority of its story beats from the original Star Wars trilogy. It’s more than that, and much of it has to do with the new characters, who are well-rendered and have loads of story potential. ![]() (It’s a little unfair that every movie in the series has to stand in the shadow of The Empire Strikes Back, which isn’t just the best Star Wars movie but also one of the best movies ever made.) If anything, the prequels set a low bar, and The Force Awakens merely needed to be decent. It’s not flawless, obviously, but it does what it has to do. Like Flixist EIC Matthew Razak said in his review, Star Wars: The Force Awakens is the Star Wars sequel you’re looking for. ![]()
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