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Star Wars: The Force Awakens

It’s been a week. If you haven’t seen Star Wars: The Force Awakens yet, I completely understand. Theaters have been packed. This review may spoil some things, however, so by all means click away from this page now.

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Still?

Okay, then.

Before I tell you how awesome it was, let me get something out of the way. Star Wars: The Force Awakens does NOT take my top spot for 2015. The Martian set a very high bar. Look at it this way: Star Wars: The Force Awakens was amazing, and restored my faith in the cinematic tradition and my hopes for the franchise. The Martian, however, gave me hope for humanity. The Martian penetrated all the way to my soul and changed me a little. Star Wars: The Force Awakens simply made me very, very happy to have seen a movie.

Don’t get me wrong, however. Star Wars: The Force Awakens was an amazing and powerful film. The Star Wars prequels made so many terrible mistakes that they ruined the franchise for me. That I again have interest in, and hope for the Star Wars franchise is close to miraculous.

An examination of the craft of film making is in order here, but I need to see the film a few more times to cement my thoughts. For now, I’ll summarize.

Everything the filmmakers did wrong with Episodes I, II, and III were done right (or simply not done) in Episode VII. More amazingly, almost everything that was done well in Episodes IV, V, and VI was done better in Episode VII.

And I mean “better.”

Not “bigger” or “louder” or “more.” BETTER. 

  • The emotional highs and lows? Better.
  • Connection with the characters? Better.
  • Special effects? Better.
  • Practical effects? Better.
  • Comprehensibility of action? Better.
  • The cantina music? Beeeyeah no. I like the original better. But give me time.

That said, Star Wars: The Force Awakens suffers from a story structure problem, likely  the result of a decision to move away from the Campbellian Monomyth, or at least obscure the Hero’s Journey a bit. On the upside, it makes the film less predictable. On the downside by stepping outside the syntax of Western cinema, the audience may end up confused. There are several places that feel weird, moments about which my inner writer is complaining. I don’t think those problems are accidents are oversights. I think the writers are experimenting, or perhaps playing the long game. I’ll reserve judgement for now.

The film’s biggest weakness, to my mind, is that Star Wars: The Force Awakens cannot escape the legacy of the films that came before it. In 1977 Star Wars changed the face of science fiction forever. That level of surprise at what a film can be is impossible to deliver again. In 1999 Lucasfilm tried to incite a similar revolution in the industry, and they gave us some of the most reviled blockbuster movies of all time. Like it or not, that’s also part of the legacy behind Star Wars: The Force Awakens. 

In short, we remember having been amazed, and having been betrayed by this franchise. We cannot help but compare Star Wars: The Force Awakens to six other films.

Me, I think it stands up really well.

 

Reviews

The Good Dinosaur

I love dinosaurs as much as the next person, but I was concerned about the concept for this film. Admittedly, this is mostly because to my mind any alternate history that’s missing the Chixulub impactor will also be missing any mammals larger than a rat, and certainly won’t feature sapient hominids, but the concern is there nonetheless, even if it’s just me.

The movie did just fine for me in spite of this. It wasn’t amazing, or even particularly surprising, and my son said that he felt like he’d seen this movie before, except in live action (a good indication that the formula is showing,) but I had a good time.

Plot formula aside, the film was beautiful. The ultra-defined realism of the environment balanced the caricatured forms of the sophonts, and those caricatures were pretty brilliant. Especially the T-Rex, voiced by Sam Elliot. We’ve all seen a T-Rex run by now, but Pixar did it differently, and with delightful effect.

The Good Dinosaur enters my 2015 list at #17, below the Threshold of Awesome, but still worth catching in 3D at the theaters. I wish I could get some screen-grabs of the environments to use as desktop wallpapers… so beautiful.

 

 

Reviews

The Peanuts Movie

PeanutsMovieThe Peanuts Movie is weird, and I’m conflicted about it. I’ll lead with this: it enters my list at #16, just a hair shy of the Threshold of Awesome.

I doubt very many of you will feel the same way I do.

I was ready to walk out of the film 20 minutes in. We were getting perfectly executed Peanuts jokes in 3D, and I found that so incredibly boring it was almost physically painful. But I stuck around, and at the 40-ish minute mark something different happened, and I was interested again.

By the end of the film I was quite happy with it. I’ve never had that happen before. I’ve never gone from “I may walk out” to “I am SO GLAD I STAYED.”

Let’s get technical for a bit.

I love Charles Schultz’s work ethic, and his economy of line. I can stare at his line work for hours studying the way a nonsense squiggle becomes, in context, the delivery mechanism for a content-rich payload.  I was very concerned that this film would lose that.

I was happy to be wrong. The animators used the computer graphics to provide the context (heads, shoulders, doghouses, kites) and then used what I swear are digitized versions of actual Schultz-squiggles as mouths, eyebrows, and worry-lines. It was a brilliant melding of line-art and computer animation. I was mesmerized.

Most people won’t be. Lines aren’t really all that interesting unless they’re at the beating heart of your career.

Charlie Brown’s try-fail cycle is always kind of depressing. His best efforts are either wrong for the problem, or will be rendered irrelevant by something outside his control. The best kite-flyer in the world cannot compete with a kite-eating tree. Hours of practice kicking footballs mean nothing if the person holding the ball plans to betray you.

A story in which the protagonist continues to try in spite of this has power, and is worth telling. But Charlie Brown is always the punchline. Even his successes are ironic, and outside his control. I can only take so much of this. It’s depressing.

Well, The Peanuts Movie gives us an Act II Twist in which Charlie Brown gets the success he always wanted. This was surprising, and fresh, and even though I knew it couldn’t last, I was interested to see how a triumphant ending could be delivered.

Most folks don’t watch movies this way, deconstructing them on the fly. Again, this was something I really enjoyed doing, but that experience might not be there for you. Especially not now that I’ve told you it’s there. Umm… spoiler alert? Sorry.

The Peanuts Movie is a film for children under the age of ten, and it seeks to keep adults happy with nostalgia. Based on the reactions of the young children in the audience, it worked just fine. I heard a tiny voice exclaim “OH NO CHARLIE BROWN” in dismay, and you know what? That was kind of awesome.

Reviews

Spectre

SpectreI’m trying to put my finger on why Spectre didn’t work for me. The salient point is that I spent much of the film being bored, so obviously there was a problem.

In Casino Royale we were shown a young James Bond who was unmade and remade by betrayal. In Quantum of Solace we were shown that the brilliance of Casino Royale may have been accidental. In Skyfall, we were given a deconstruction and un-making of Bond as a nice capstone for a trilogy of Daniel Craig installments in the series. It was the perfect book-end opposite Casino Royale. The two films deserved better stuff between them.

And now Spectre comes along and undercuts Skyfall. It is set shortly thereafter, and it tells us that these other Bond adventures were all connected to a single underlying conspiracy, a massive confederacy of hitherto undetected mega-miscreants whose nefarious plans and dastardly schemes are finally coming to fruition.

That’s a hard sell, and they tried to close the deal by giving us something just shy of a clip show.

It didn’t work for me.

Most Bond films are a series of Green-Eggs-And-Ham set-pieces. “Would you, could you, on a boat? Would you, could you, in the throat? Would you could you on a train? Would you hey we’re now in Spain.” And so on. The best Bond films mask this by tying everything together with a multi-layered mystery, with reveal after reveal drawing us into the new locations. The worst ones find us coming to our senses in the middle of an action scene and asking ourselves why we’re in Austria.

On to the good stuff:

  • Q gets the best line of the film. It’s such a good line that I can’t believe I’ve never heard it before. I wish I’d thought of it.
  • Dave Bautista is scary. He’s even bigger and scarier in well-tailored suits.
  • The two big explosions were cool.
  • The set pieces were quite pretty, especially the Día de Muertos costumed crowd scenes.
  • SpectreOSTThe music. (I bought the soundtrack, which I think I’ll enjoy much more than I enjoyed the film itself.)
  • If you love James Bond films, hey, look! This is a James Bond film!

Spectre enters my 2015 list at #21. Not awesome, not disappointing, and unfortunately not particularly memorable.