Batman v Common Sense
***Warning: This blog post contains pretty much nothing but spoilers about Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. While it hasn't been in theaters for all that long, I would still assume that most people who care have probably watched (or hate-watched) it already, and as such may no longer have the higher brain functions required to read after the the two and a half hour onslaught of mind-numbing absurdity that was this movie. Nonetheless, I still want to make it clear that if you haven't seen the film, and plan to do so at some point, you should probably stop reading now so that you too may enjoy the euphoria of delirious incomprehension with fresh, untainted eyes. Consider yourselves warned.***
Okay, I swear this blog isn't devolving into little more than outdated rants about the flaws in overblown children's movies. It's really not, promise. But I did want to say a few quick words about Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice because...well, I lead an extremely boring life, and it's just about the only vaguely interesting thing that's happened to me lately. When most of your life consists of sitting at a desk working, and the rest is taken up by coming up with non-productive excuses to avoid talking to people, it's easy for badmouthing the fruits of someone else's hard labor to become the most exciting part of your week.
While my recent post on Star Wars may have been a decidedly minority opinion (which I highly recommend reading when you have a few hours to kill), it's a bit less controversial to say that that Batman v Superman: Dawn of Just-End-It-Now-Please was an exceptionally vapid collection of fire and noises, assault on the senses, crafted with all the intricate delicacy that Godzlla typically employs when conducting urban renewal. I've talked to some people who liked it with caveats, and even a couple people who genuinely loved the film. My own personal opinion was very similar to burning my mouth on a hot slice of pizza: once you've sat through it long enough that you've become totally numb, it's not exactly unpleasant, but does feel a little pointless.
And I know some people would say that you shouldn't be reading too much into a movie about a brooding rich kid whose rodent fascination leads him to invent things that are beyond the reach of the entire defense department, much less one in which his main adversary is an extraterrestrial GQ model who thinks that an ice palace is the perfect place to sit around in his pajamas. And I would agree that there isn't much point in trying to find reason in fantasy. Once you accept the premise that the impossible is perfectly normal, your rational mind should be able to just walk itself down to the pub and grab a couple of drinks while you aren't using it for a few hours.
Even so, my problem with Bat out of Hell v Superunknown wasn't simply a nitpicking search for rationality in an inherently irrational universe. It was that I had absolutely no idea what was happening on even the most basic level. One thing consistently fails to lead to another, but that doesn't stop another thing from happening of its own irrational accord. On an initial viewing, Sense v Sensibility seemed to be a series of unrelated vignettes, centered around some romantic comedy cliche of gargantuan egos fighting against the inevitability of their inexplicable attraction. And again, I'm not exactly expecting plausibility or realism from a movie about people who wear clothing that is both skin tight and indestructible, any more than I would expect a tasteful and character-driven nude scene from a horror film. Even so, I do expect them to follow at least some twisting path of logic that is simple enough for me to grasp without having a child handy to explain it. The real problem with Batman v Superman wasn't a lack of faithfulness to the source material, or a lack of realism. It was the staggering number of times that anything at all would happen on screen and my first thought would be, "Wait...what?" The story was so convoluted and absurd, it almost felt like the result of an Improv 101 class Yes-Anding each other until they realized that they needed to throw out about thirty pages of their script before submitting it in the morning.
Now, before I go too far down the rabbit hole of criticizing this movie, I want to establish my official Comic Book Geek Credentials right up front: I have none. I read plenty of comic books as a kid, of course. What else would a boy in the 80s do with his time between episodes of Ninja Turtles and Duck Tales? However, I was never much of a superhero guy when it came to comics. I got my Marvel and DC fixes through pretty much every other means you could imagine: toys, cartoons, movies, trading cards, you name it. But when you get right down to it, I was always more of a comedy nerd, which led to a nearly complete disinterest in reading anything that didn't make me giggle. So when it came to comic books, I eschewed the popular titles like Spider-Man or X-Men in favor of parody comics like Marvel's What The--?! and endless movie and TV tie-in comics, from Dinosaurs to Bill & multiple Roger Rabbit themed titles. I'm probably the only person I know who can say that they've read every issue of Bill & Ted's Excellent Comic Book, which even in this era of ironic obscurism, I'm not sure that I can count as a positive achievement. Though I will say that there is one scene from that last idiotic series that I consider to be very personally meaningful. In the opening of one Bill & Ted comic, an accountant or some such fellow is toiling away in Hell, musing on the fact that the place isn't always as bad there as people make it out to be. Every once in a great while, a cool, sunny day will break through the fire and brimstone to give you a moment of beautiful relief. Which lasts exactly long enough to remind you of how terrible everything is all the rest of time you get a perfect, cool, sunny day, which last just long enough to remind you of how terrible things are all the rest of the time. To this day, that is still the first thing that I think of any time that anything good happens to me.
Anyway, my point is that I'm not the sort of guy who can rant for hours about how Batman's belt was slightly the wrong color when compared to panel six of page twelve of so on and so forth. Really, I don't know much about any superheroes beyond the highlights that can be boiled down and fit onto an action figure package back. The practical upshot of which is that I don't usually tend to care about the creative liberties that are taken when adapting comics to film. I don't care if characters are combined, or an origin story is tweaked slightly. All I care about is that the movie is fun, entertaining, and not so overly complicated that I can't shut my higher brain off and mindlessly shovel popcorn while weaving my way through a basic understanding of what is going.
Of course, the downside to my limited education in graphic novels is that I don't usually have much background knowledge going in, which can be helpful in slogging your way through a convoluted mess like Sadbat v Supermodel. I listened to a review from my friends over at the Mass Moviecide podcast, who talked extensively about Lex Luther having orchestrated the showdown between our heroes. But after two and a half hours of movie and an hour of their in-depth discussion, I couldn't begin to tell you how he actually did that. As far as I could tell, he was just wandering around, doing his own thing before jumping in as an oddly well-informed MC for the fight of the century. Sure, he acted out every American's fantasy of blowing up their elected representatives in an effort to turn the public against Superman, and he somehow created Doomsday to beat up the good guys once they'd reunited the halves of their friendship necklaces. But what did he do to actually bring Batman and Superman together for an epic battle royale, other than introducing them to each other at a party?But hold on. They say you should always mention two positive things before delivering any criticisms, so let's not get ahead of ourselves here. First, I have to admit that Ben Affleck was a shockingly good Batman. I say "shockingly" because it's really hard to believe that the most redeeming feature of this movie was also the thing that unleashed the biggest maelstrom of internet rage that I have ever seen for a bit of movie casting. And yet, not only was Ben Affleck a good Batman, he was an even better Bruce Wayne. With the benefit of hindsight, it's perhaps not surprising that Ben Affleck excels at playing a friendless rich kid who is past his prime, but such is the nature of reactionary public outrage. He was great, the costume was great, and the warehouse fight scene is one of the best choreographed Bat-pummelings that I've ever seen.
And the second positive thing that I can say is that eventually, the movie came mercifully to an end.
Okay, back to the Luthor bashing. (The movie didn't follow any real narrative order, so why should I?) Now, as an actor, I think Jesse Eisenberg is a pretty good one, though he does have the unfornuate mark of a character actor that no matter what he says or does, he always looks and sounds like the exact same person. And while I don't object to updating fictional characters to put them in a more modern context, or filmmakers trying something new and different with their interpretation of a role, it did feel like they were pushing that idea too far by arming Mark Zuckerberg with a mediocre poet's thesaurus and casting him as a criminal mastermind. A criminal mastermind who, again, doesn't seem to actually mastermind much. Perhaps a veiled commentary on Mark Zuckerberg taking full credit for Facebook? Who's to say.
But apparently Lex Luthor is such an unrequited genius that he can just wander up to a sophisticated bit of alien technology and write the Wiki-how article on genetically modifying corpses. When he started becoming blood brothers with Zod's corpse, I had absolutely no idea what he was doing, why he thought to try doing it, or why the ship just accepted on good faith that he was its new master. Though to be fair, that's probably at least partially my own fault. I'm sure this must have been a callback to events in Man of Steel, which I haven't seen since its opening weekend. And I could bemoan the fact that they're relying too heavily on an assumption that we all have a working knowledge of a mediocre movie from three years ago, but I'll give them a pass and acknowledge that I have an exceptionally poor memory for these kinds of things.
Anyway, however he managed it, Luthor plays My Heart Will Go On with a dead alien, and thus we are given Doomsday, an andogynous space orc who has oddly well defined buttocks for someone with no genitalia. And side note, when I told my wife after the movie that this character had a name and it was in fact Doomsday, she nearly died laughing. Not sure what says about the movie, but wanted to throw it out there.
But let's back up. Wonder Woman, what? No, let's back up even further. Batman hates Superman because Superman accidentally killed some Wayne Corp employees. Which is justifiable, because we all know that even with a WTF Pod discount, Zip Recruiter ain't cheap. So Batman hates Superman because he now has no excuse not to give his friend's nephew a job, and Superman hates Batman because he takes the law into his own hands and has a way better car. It all makes perfect sense. So naturally, Batman tries to kill Superman with a stick made out of a stolen magic space-rock, not because he thinks Superman is inherently evil, but because you can never trust someone who doesn't get their power from naming everything they touch Bat-Noun. Again, this all makes perfect sense to me.
Then we meet the dramatic turning point of the movie: the big Batman v Superman showdown. And after having spent an entire movie fueled with vengeful rage, Batman steadies his hand at the last second and decides that Superman must be a good guy after all. Why? Because they both have mothers named Martha. And from cinemas across the world we hear the collective cry of, "What the holy living fuck?" Batman, The Dark Knight, The World's Greatest Detective, a man with an intellect so vast that he he can invent anything that you can attach the prefix "Bat" to, and the one thing that he hadn't considered when weighing the relative human goodness of a stranger was whether or not they are forever bonded by an arbitrary and meaningless coincidence. Batman suddenly and irrationally forgives Superman of all his imagined sins simply because their mothers were both born when Martha was considerably more popular would be akin to saying, "Hello, my name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to..hey, cool Deep Blue Something shirt. Did you really catch the the '95 tour? Breakfast at Tiffany's is good, sure, but you really have to explore their deep album tracks to appreciate their mastery of songcraft. Sorry, what were we talking about? Couldn't have been anything important."
So the new Dynamic Duo decides to band together and defeat Doomsday, apparently unhindered by his absurd name. But those of you who are still bothered by the death toll in Man of Steel's epic final battle can relax, because before the battle really begins, a news reporter conveniently points out that the downtown area is relatively empty since it's taking place after business hours. Which is great, because instead of millions of people dying in the crossfire, the casualties will be limited to the homeless, anyone meeting for dinner on their first OK Cupid date, and all the night janitors in the city. Begging the question, who is going to clean up this mess? And by the way, while we're on the subject of lazy writing, I really hope that when the President of the United States orders a nuclear strike, his code word is, "May God have mercy on us all." But I digress.
Doomsday tries to kill Batman, but he is miraculously saved by a scantily clad woman who happens to have an atomic-fire proof shield. We of course recognize her as Wonder Woman, as this moment has been featured very prominently in all the promotional material for the film. And Batman and Superman accept her as an ally based solely on a tiny bit of flirting with Bruce Wayne and a Google image search that reveled her to be in surprisingly good shape for a grandmother, with absolutely no follow up questions beyond, "Hey, do you know this chick? No. Good enough for me!" And I know that I've been spoiled by Marvel spoonfeeding us hours of backstory in preparation for The Avengers, and that DC is trying to reverse that trend by using this film to pique our interest in the standalone films that will be coming. But even so, as an audience member, I do feel like I need a little bit of hand hold when being introduced to a new character. Because again, I'm not a comic book guy, and I know virtually nothing of Wonder Woman. I never read any of her comics, I remember so little about the Justice League cartoon from the 80s that I didn't realize until a Wikipedia search from five seconds ago that it was actually called Super Friends, and I'd never seen so much as a second of the live action Linda Hamilton TV show until I was at a Greek Pizza place in middle of nowhere Maine about two months ago, where I'm sure it was being broadcast for the first time. So you can imagine my confusion when Clark and Lois are sharing an emotional moment as the world crumbles in the background like a scene straight out of Fight Club, and we suddenly cut to an insert shot of Wonder Woman hogtying Doomsday with a glowing, golden lasso. After a few minutes of searching the deep archives of my brain, I was able to conjure some vague recollection of this being a thing. But for several minutes, I just wanted the fighting to stop long enough for Batman to ask her something like, "What the hell is that thing? Is it magic? Or is a special micro-fibre Bat-lasso that works because you're a scientist and say so? And where could you possibly have been hiding it in that non-outfit you decided to wear into the middle of a volcanic crater?" (It has since been brought to my attention that it was on her hip the whole time, and was forged by elves so that it glows when orcs are near.)
Plus, speaking of our Super Friends, I'll be honest. I was very excited when I learned that Aquaman was going to be in this movie, and even squealed a little when they released his first emo-headshot from the movie. Once again, not because I was a fan of his comics, which I wasn't. Rather, I was excited because he was my absolute favorite toy to play with in the bathtub when I was five, and I definitely feel like that merits a big-screen treatment. So you can imagine my disappointment when he pulled a Luke Skywalker and did literally nothing in the actual movie. We see him swim for two seconds in a private YouTube clip, then swim away. Which I guess does at least constitute more leg movement than we got from Mr. Skywalker, but still. I expected more.
But this is not to say that I didn't have fun. As I've said, I have a lot less emotional investment in these characters than I do in Star Wars, so despite my criticisms, I was able to enjoy the mindless idiocy of it all. And hey, despite Wonder Woman being a completely unnecessary and one-dimensional character, I did get excited to see more of her and Gone Batty Gone in the upcoming films of the franchise. Even so, I wished the movie as a whole had been good enough that I cared even a little bit when Superman died. Sure, it's not that emotionally meaningful of a loss because we all know it's only temporary, and he'll rise from the dead and ascend to the heavens again in a few Easters' time. But when you're invested in a character, you are supposed to feel sad when faced with their suffering. And with such a well-known cultural icon as Superman, it shouldn't take much to tug on the heart strings. Instead, when Martha Kent gives Lois an engagement ring and she's confronted with the life that they could have had together, all I could think was, "Hey, anything to get out of wedding planning, right?" Which is probably not the response that Zack Snyder was looking for. But as long as he continues to put spectacle above substance, and substance above basic understanding and common sense, it's the one he's going to get.
I just hope that the negative response from critics doesn't cause DC to pull the plug on the franchise before we get enough real quality time with Aquaman, as my mother always used to...
-TC
P.S., If you want to hear much more entertaining discussions of this and other films, seriously, check out the Mass Moviecide podcast.
The Force Can Go Back to Sleep
***Warning: This blog post contains pretty much nothing but spoilers about Star Wars: The Force Awakes. While it's been out long enough that anyone who cares has probably seen it already, I still thought I should place this disclaimer right up front so that the one person who was holding out to experience it for the first time on glorious Blu-ray can't be offended that after months spent carefully treading through Internet comment boards like shark infested waters, they suddenly have everything spoiled at the last moment by some unknown idiot with an unpopular blog. If that sounds like you, then consider yourself warned.***
For the last several months, I've been carrying around a deep, dark secret. Something so terrible, so shocking that I spend every moment of my day consumed by a fear that someone will find out about the horrible truth that separates me from all mankind. But you can't live your life in fear, so here goes: I didn't like Star Wars: The Force Awakens. The few people that I have willingly discussed the matter with have even heard me go so far as to say that it it might just have retroactively ruined my love for all things Star Wars. It's a bold statement, I know, running as it does so contrary to the state sanctioned opinion that this film represents the salvation of all things geeky. To publicly deny its greatness is like denying the existence of God at a baptism: simultaneously sacrilegious and generally impolite. But it's honestly how I feel. I honestly think it wasn't a very good movie, and that its biggest faults were so great as to be an affront to the entire history of cinema.
Still with me? No? Good.
Before I get into exactly how I formed this opinion, I want to make one thing perfectly clear: I am wrong. What is more, I know I am wrong. No one in the world seems to share my view. Critics hail it as the return of great sci-fi, and audiences praise it as a much needed palate cleanser after the colossally bad taste left from the Prequels. As for me, I sat in audience of The Force Awakens with my arms crossed in stern disapproval, watching bitterly as the rest of civilization drooled greedily for more, like castaways who managed to escape their desolate island prison, only to land their makeshift raft directly inside a steak house.
With that much universal love for The Force Awakens, there can only be two possible explanations for my personal dissent. First, the entire human population has been so severely brainwashed and deprived of happiness that they will immediately and mechanically fall in love with anything that nominally stimulates their pleasure centers, while I alone have managed to maintain my sanity in the face of this slowly decaying republic. Second, and much more likely, is the possibility that I am nothing more than a joyless buzzkill who is desperately clinging to a wrong-headed misconception because it comforts me in a way that reason never could, like a climate change denier hanging on to the last scraps of vaguely credible pseudo-science for dear life, or the poor, dear souls who managed to convince themselves the finale to Lost was satisfying. Occam's Razor and my limited sense of self-worth would suggest that it is highly unlikely that in an age of universal human decline, I could never possibly be the sole beacon of hope shining through the encroaching darkness of societal madness. So in all probability, I must simply be wrong.
But of course, like any self-respecting American, I don't feel wrong. And therefore, my ridiculous and factually unsupported opinion must be right.
In other reasons why my thoughts on The Force Awakens should be disregarded, I only saw the movie once on opening night. Between the passage of time and my notoriously sieve like memory, it is entirely possible, perhaps even likely, that some of the more salient details have already been forgotten over the last two months. Plus, I didn't lose my mind over Mad Max: Fury Road (a incredibly shot film with an atrociously bad script), and thought Jurassic World was just about the worst movie I've ever seen. So I clearly don't have a great track record of picking winners in The Great Franchise Reboot Wars of 2015.
With those caveats in place, I guess what I'm trying to say is that anyone who feels like reading a poorly constructed and wrong-headed argument based on spotty recollection and a stubborn adherence to empirically incorrect personal perceptions should by all means keep reading. The rest of you are welcome and encouraged to go back to your normal lives, secure in the knowledge that you aren't missing anything by ignoring the ravings of yet another mere Internet lunatic.
Now I wouldn't go so far as to say that there was nothing I enjoyed about The Force Awakens. In fact, going in after Episode VII hysteria had been slowly mounting for months, my excitement was so great that for most of film's run time, I was willing to put any nagging criticisms aside and let the pros firmly outweigh the cons. I thought that all the new cast members gave strong performances and created interesting and likable characters, and I was particularly impressed with Adam Driver. Which is odd, considering that most people I know who loved the movie would still argue that Kylo Ren was whiny and too non-threatening to be taken seriously as a villain. But I, for one, was intrigued by seeing a young, out of control villain who had not yet developed into a fully-formed icon of terror. I liked that we were starting the franchise with a character who could grow from an angry, impetuous pawn into a truly terrifying leader once he realized the extent of his own power. And perhaps due to my low expectations of Driver's acting abilities going in, I was amazed that his performance was anything more than an awkward, neurotic artist in space.
Furthermore, I thought the action scenes were everything you'd want from a big budget popcorn movie, and I appreciated the move away from the overused CGI of the prequels in favor of practical sets and effects. It definitely scratched my nostalgia itch and felt more like a real Star Wars movie to see the old faces of the original cast returning for real this time, in a way was never achieved by the Absurdly Nimble Yoda, Implausibly Good Looking Obi-Wan, and Resting Bitch Face Pre-Vader from The Films That Shall Not Be Named. Plus, it had lightsabers. And there's nothing I love more in a movie than a good lightsaber fight. Which is why to this day I maintain that Hot Shots Part Deux is a better film than The Godfather. (Sorry Vito, but if you're going to whack someone, you really should do it with a controlled, handheld laser beam.)
There was plenty to like about the movie, so why didn't I? I've already touched on one of the main reasons, and that's the fact that it felt like a real Star Wars movie. Sure, by just about any measure The Force Awakens is a better movie than Episodes I-III combined. It avoided so many of the mistakes from its predecessors, and succeeded on many counts. But the prequels do have one advantage: They were easy to dismiss because they felt like they had so little to do with Real Star Wars. What with the completely different aesthetic of the CGI, the rampant inconsistencies when compared to the original trilogy, and insane idea that all this history could have realistically been forgotten by an entire galaxy in just twenty years, it was easy to write them off as of little more consequence than a piece of mildly interesting fan fiction and appreciate them for the few merits that they did have. (I have trouble naming any off the top of my head, but I'm sure they involved lightsabers somehow.)
But through the extremes that J.J. Abrams and crew went through to distance themselves from the prequels and make the film feel more like they originals, they also made it feel incontrovertibly like part of the series. The presence of Harrison Ford, Mark Hamill, and Carrie Fisher alone are enough to tie back to the new film to the original series, which makes it so much harder to tell myself that it doesn't really count, so its flaws can be overlooked. And I know that technically, the Star Wars Christmas (I'm sorry, Life Day) special also had those same actors and is hardly considered canonical. But you know what? It also had a musical number from Bea Arthur. CGI that shit onto Hoth and I'd disown The Empire Strikes Back, too.
So getting back to my original point, what are these perceived flaws that I'm having trouble looking past? No one else seems to find anything wrong with the movie, so how many bad could its shortcomings really be? Let's start with one of the more obvious and frequently cited criticisms, the similarities to the original Star Wars. Overall, I didn't actually find this as bothersome as some of my fellow buzzkillers make it out to be. I was fine that our main hero was a seemingly orphaned child who had been abandoned on a desert planet that seemed to be ruled largely by the scrap trade. I was fine that the The Rebel Alliance and The Galactic Empire were alive and well, just with a fresh coat of paint and some new silly names (The Resistance and The First Order). I didn't care that Poe's torture scene was virtually a beat-by-beat recycling of General, neé Princess, Leia's own interrogation, or that moments after meeting Han Solo he is quickly confronted by a couple bands of aliens who were exactly pissed about a deal gone wrong and competent as our dearly departed Greedo.
But there were a few similarities that did really bother me. Most notably, I was extremely disappointed to learn that our main plot device was still blowing up Death Stars by exploiting a small architectural flaw. Two movies worth of planet-destroying space stations being brought down by poor engineering revealed on a 3D map was already a bit much for me, and I didn't feel there was much left to be explored with that theme. The fact that was justified by a self-referential quip from Han Solo about how there's always a way to blow these things up may have seemed cute to the filmmakers, but to me it felt like a confession that they were simply rehashing a tired formula and didn't have a better rationale for it than shrugging into the camera and saying, "what are ya gonna do? It's Star Wars!"Furthermore, BB-8 was a completely unnecessary character. He served no real purpose other than to recall a more charismatic beeping robot full of plans from the original films, sell a million toys, and propel an idiotic plot about a guy who ran away to hide, but left behind an exact map to his location which can only be delivered in pieces by unassuming robots, or possibly Max von Sydow. I wouldn't have objected to BB-8 as a character if he done anything more than serve as a surrogate R2-D2 when it came time to order a messenger service.
And as far as I'm concerned, the less said about the Space Reggae Cantina Band, the better. Return of the Jedi's attempt to recreate that magic of the Modal Noes was already a big swing and a miss before the Special Editions came along and turned some background tunes into the music video from Men in Black.
Beyond the parallels to the original, I also found plenty of things to dislike even among the list of things that I did like. For example, as I said, I was glad that the movie was much less reliant on CGI than the prequels. But the mixture of digital animation, modern filmmaking technology, and practical effects never quite meshed for me. Filmed and projected in stunning high definition, the rubber suits and puppets gave the film a nice throwback quality, but often looked down right cheap when projected thirty feet high and crystal clear. As a small example, I remember an early scene where Rey is speeding across the desert, and there is an scavenging bird puppet taking up most of the frame for a moment. It's a throwaway kind of effect, a small little detail to round out the cinematic canvas. But to me, it was just about single most fake looking thing I'd ever seen in a Star Wars movie. And that includes Han Solo's digital head bob when Greedo shoots first, as well as Luke's suave reaction after his sister kisses him in Empire.
The practical effects looked particularly cheesy when contrasted with the bits of blatant CGI that did pop up. Supreme Leader Snoke came off as disconcertingly cartoony when he was suddenly projected larger than life into the film. And Maz Kanata seemed completely out of place in her own bar, as everyone else in the joint was trying so desperately to recreate the magic of the ethnically-diverse group of rubber-masked Aliens of Mos Eisley. For the most part, the practical effects weren't too bad, and the CGI was pretty good. But when put together, they made the film seem like a schizophrenic and slapdash mess.
I was also a little put off by the pacing of the film. The story progresses with such brutal, break-neck speed that wasn't time for much in the way of real character development. Instead, events consistently a little too neatly, and friendships form a little too quickly. Pretty early in the film, natural born enemies Finn and Poe develop a shaky allegiance based on nothing more than mutual opportunism, yet within minutes they're laughing and bantering like soul mates. Fate separates them, but when they are reunited an hour later, they embrace and start swapping clothing like sorority girls on club night.
Worse yet, not long after curmudgeonly Han Solo meets up with Rey he's already asking her to become his business partner with all the self-assured charm of an eighth grade band geek asking for a date to the prom, and based on what? Fifteen minutes of shared screen time spent largely engaged in an absurd alien chase sequence straight out of an episode of Red Dwarf? To say nothing about the fact that Anakin needed years of training to master the force, and Luke at least needed to do some mist-jogging with a puppet on his back before he could call himself a true Jedi. But all Rey needed in order to fulfill her destiny was to be handed a lightsaber and guess that she probably possessed the powers of mind control.
Something I'm always a bit sensitive to in movies is bad dialogue, and The Force Awakens came up short on this count as well. Cringe-worthy moments of contemporary pop culture infecting the behavior of interstellar heroes were mercifully few and far between, but I did wince a bit at things like Finn exclaiming, "Droid, please!" or BB-8 giving him a thumb-less up. The bigger issue with the writing was all the shameless exposition that was thrown in to help us catch up on the events of the past thirty years. And I know that Star Wars as a series is no stranger to exposition. I've read articles reminding us that anytime things get a bit confusing in the original trilogy, a mentor-ghost conveniently shows up to plainly explain everything. And that's certainly a fair point. But to me, that's totally different (said every idiot desperately trying to validate a losing argument). It's different because in those first films, we were establishing something new. An entire universe was being created, and that required a little bit of hand holding. Sure, Obi-Wan casually tosses out a reference to some Clone Wars that we've never seen, but that was just giving a bit of color to Luke's origin story. And sure, Han Solo has to explain how The Millennium Falcon is the fastest ship in the galaxy, but that's just set up the joke of how decrepit it looks when Luke first sees it. But The Force Awakens was just chock-full of exposition and backstory that felt less like fleshing out details of a story that's too big to tell, and more like people that were describing a movie that was more interesting than the one I'd paid twelve dollars to see. I wanted to see the evolution of Kylo Ren and his betrayal of Luke Skywalker, and not just as a fifteen second flashback. I wanted to see The First Order rising from the ashes of the the Empire. I wanted to see Han and Leia as a playfully bantering yet still loving couple, or Luke as a fully developed Jedi master. I wanted to see that movie.
As a result, General, neé Princess, Leia felt like almost a complete waste in the movie. This is not meant as a slight against Carrie Fisher, of course, who I thought gave a pretty solid performance. But her character is missing for half the movie, then when she finally does show up, she's mostly just serving as a mouthpiece for Big Exposition, especially when she manages to steal a few minutes alone with her ex-husband. Which I suppose makes some sort of sense, considering that when you're left alone with your ex, you should always do whatever possible to avoid talking about your real feelings. And what better way to do that than to just repeat things you already know, like what a fuck up your kid is? But Leia is supposed to be an important, strong female character, one of the most important characters in the Star Wars universe, and yet she doesn't seem to serve much of a purpose in this movie. Sure, she had a fancy new job title, but she does almost nothing that couldn't have been done just as well by Admiral Akbar, who probably got paid a lot less to come out of retirement.
Even more than Leia, I was deeply disappointed with how they chose to use Luke. That is to say, I was really disappointed that they didn't use him at all. Now this is a complaint that I will definitely attribute to personal preference rather than any real flaw with the movie itself. But ever since the 80s, for as long as I've been able to experience thoughts more complex than "hungry" or "tired," I've been waiting for more Luke Skywalker. And when it was announced that the entire original cast would be returning for Episode VII, I was over the moon with excitement at the prospect of finally seeing The Continuing Adventures of Luke Skywalker, even if he was going to be a bit older, hairier, and doughier. So I felt badly let down when I learned that A) his story of the last thirty years consisted of little more than pussying out and running off to hide in a petulant funk the moment that anything complicated happened; and B) when we picked up his story, he would appear in about two shots and speak exactly zero lines of dialogue. Granted, he will almost certainly have a much larger role in Episode VIII, but that's not the point. After thirty years of patiently hoping, I think I'm entitled to a little instant gratification, dammit.
Then, to round out my disappointment in the original cast, there was Han Solo. And more specifically, pretty much everything about him. When he appeared in the first full trailer, I was excited, even ecstatic. The wry smile, the familiar blaster, the awesome jacket. It was all there. When he said "Chewy, we're home," we all knew he was referring to The Millennium Falcon in the background, and we were pumped to see all the elements finally reassembled. And if that wasn't enough to get me pumped, it even looked like Harrison Ford can act again. Based on that one line, it looked like Harrison ford had regained his ability to at least pretend he cared about a script. I can't remember the last time that I saw Ford in a movie or a trailer and felt like he gave even a little bit of a shit about the words that were coming out of his mouth, and I was excited to think that J.J. Abrams had somehow cajoled him into doing a good job. Based on those three little words, it looked like this movie was going to be an incredible return to form, not just for Ford but for the entire franchise. Any hesitation I might have had about new Star Wars films was after the prequels was forgotten and forgiven. I was was ready for greatness.
Unfortunately, it seems that they picked that line not just because it was a good sound bite for the trailer, or because it encapsulated the idea that the franchise was being restored to its former glory, but because it was Harrison Ford's only decent performance in the entire movie. Now I will grant you that his work in The Force Awakens was definitely stronger than his other recent work, but "relatively not bad" is not the same thing as "good." After the film's release, I heard numerous people say that he should be (or at this point, should have been) nominated for an Oscar for his revival of Han Solo, and I just couldn't believe my ears. To me, nearly every line seemed like he hadn't bothered to memorize the script, and before every take just said "I'll ad-lib something Star Wars-y, and you can cut around it." But they didn't. And as bad a job as they did of editing around his dispassionate acting, they did an even worse job of cutting around the fact that he can't run to save his life. Maybe it was old age, or maybe it was the injury he sustained on set, but his movements were all so jerky and sluggish that every action scene that he appeared was tainted by more than a hint of absurdity. He's not a warrior or a hero anymore, he's just a dottering old man stumbling through a battlefield where by any reasonable measure he should have been the first casualty.
Beyond Ford's performance, the whole character of Han Solo felt a little bit off to me. The aforementioned Greedo-esque showdown with the rival smugglers he'd crossed, and the ensuing monster chase sequence felt more like a parody of Star Wars than anything else. It was too ridiculous, too over-the-top, like some studio exec had chimed in and said "how can we take this character that everyone knows and crank it to eleven?" When he fires Chewbacca's crossbow for the first time and says with awe, "I like this thing," it was a cute little funny moment, but it seemed very strange that he and his Wookie sidekick had spent their entire lives together, but he hadn't realized what his best friend's weapon of choice actually did until that very moment. And again, his oddly fast sentimental attachment to Rey seemed completely unwarranted for any reason other than a dirty old man wanting to hang out with a pretty young scoundrel. Plus, after he and Leia had presumably spent years together, even going so far as to produce and raise a colossally disappointing child together, it didn't seem believable that upon reuniting they'd go straight back to annoying each other without sharing a single honest emotional moment beyond a two second "glad you didn't just die on this battlefield as you should have" hug.
But even so, I was still willing to go along with it, Solo and all. Sure the movie wasn't perfect, but who cares? It's Star Wars! There are lightsabers and banter and Chewbacca! What more could a ten year old boy at heart ask for? Then came...the scene. The scene that irrevocably ruined the whole movie for me, and made it impossible for me to view the entire franchise without a thin veneer of white hot rage. I am of course referring to the death of Han Solo.
Now let me start by confessing that I didn't want Solo to die at all. I know so many people who, like Harrison Ford himself, thought he should have died back in Jedi, but I never agreed with that opinion. Star Wars has always been about escapist fantasy, and real human tragedy has no place in it. Obi-Wan's death is kind of sad the first time you see it, but he's a relatively unfamiliar character at that point, and he keeps coming back as a ghost every few minutes, so you get the feeling that it was all for the best. Alderaan getting blown up is a theoretical tragedy, sure, but it's a nameless, faceless tragedy. We've never seen its verdant hills or happy people, so it's hard to relate to on any level greater than the abstract. C-3PO gets blown up a bit, but Chew puts him back together and he's good as new, even if his head is temporarily backwards. And hell, the saddest thing that happens in Return of the Jedi is that in the middle of a major galactic war, one of the mildly recognizable teddy bears fails to get back up. Star Wars isn't about the real costs of war, it's about good looking heroes going on a fun adventure, and learning a little something about themselves in the process (but not too much). It's the sort of story where you know the good guys are going to win and everyone lives happily ever after, so the stakes are never that high. It would have seemed out of place if in Jedi, one of the central characters suddenly showed his vulnerability and became mortal. And if he didn't do it then, it's certainly too late to do it now.
I didn't want Han Solo to die, not just because it didn't feel like it fit the piece, but also because of my own emotional attachments. Han Solo had been such an integral part of my childhood that he felt like a real person to me. I remember Star Wars from before I remember meeting most of my family. In fact, when I first saw Star Wars, I was so young that I couldn't yet distinguish between real and fantasy, so I believed the characters were real people. I remember having a nightmare once where Darth Vader showed up in my mom's bedroom, and when I woke up the next morning, the thought never occurred to me that it might have only been a dream, because the characters were so real that they could easily pop by at any moment. Supposedly they lived a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, but I didn't have a fully formed concept of death yet, and probably couldn't read either.
But since then, I've seen each film in the original trilogy more times than any other movie by far, and spent countless hours reliving their exploits with toys, or running around the back yard pretending to be a Jedi by waving around candlesticks or anything else I could find that was vaguely shaped like the handle of a lightsaber. To lose a character from this world felt like losing someone close to me, and it hurt. Which, to be fair, is exactly what the filmmakers were probably going for. They wanted to shock us by unexpectedly taking away something that we loved, and leave us feeling scared and vulnerable. And they succeeded. When it actually happened and Han Solo tumbled into oblivion, I was sad, angry, and thirsting for Kylo Ren's blood, just like they wanted.
All that being said, I know that just because I don't want something to happen doesn't mean that it won't or shouldn't happen, and Solo's fate is not up to me. But if they're going to destroy something so precious to me, and a character that is so iconic in film history, I would at least hope that they would do it in a way that honored the character and felt right for the story. And as soon as the first wave of my initial, purely emotional reaction subsided, I found plenty of better reasons to feel disappointed in the scene.
For starters, it is so obviously foreshadowed that you see it coming a mile away. Sure, I was a bit shocked when it actually happened because a little part of me didn't believe they'd really do it. But from nearly the first minute that you see Han Solo on screen, it seemed so clumsily obvious that his death was coming that you could hardly considered it a wry plot twist. Leia saying "it always feels like the last time I'm going to see you," the surrogate emperor asking Kylo Ren if he could could kill his father, Solo's odd, sad sentimentality in wanting a new partner to cruise around with him like the old days, the absurdity of an old smuggler still running a young man's game. It all adds up to a fate that was sealed long before the camera started rolling. Especially the nonsensical decision that he and Chewy should split up when laying explosives for no readily apparent reason. When Chewy howls his wordless plan, Solo's agreement reads as though he were saying, "yes, Chewbacca, your plan is narratively necessary, therefore I see no reason not to agree to it without hesitation." Before he even gets to that bridge, any viewer with a shred of sense knows he's not coming back. So what should have been a major plot twist came off as nothing more than a boardroom decision to shock the audience and get rid of their most expensive actor so that they could smoothly pass along the reigns to a new class of more photogenic heroes.
Furthermore, when people talked about Han Solo dying at the end of Return of the Jedi, they always talked about the significance of him dying as a hero. Committing an act of self-sacrifice would complete the growth of his character from a scoundrel to a true man of honor. He'd fly The Millennium Falcon directly into the Death Star, knowing he wouldn't come back, all for the sake of destroying the Empire and saving his friends. The ultimate reward he'd been searching for would not be money or glory, but the knowledge that he was part of something greater than himself. Instead, we get him walking into an obvious trap because his ex-wife nagged him into a pointless exercise in futility. It wasn't a sacrifice or an act of bravery, it was foolishness for Solo to make himself so vulnerable when everyone else in the universe could tell that there was no real chance of success, and his death didn't accomplish anything. All it did was remind us that the bad guy was, in fact, a bad guy. Han Solo didn't die as a warrior, he died as a pathetic and sentimental old fool, wandering obliviously into a useless, inevitable demise.
You could argue that it wasn't foolish because it was his son. There's a relationship between them as father and son that made it necessary for Solo to at least try, even if he knew he was risking his life and would probably fail. But that brings me back to the overly-rapid narrative and lazy writing. Yes, there should be an emotional dynamic to a father and son confronting each other, especially when it ends in patricide. But the film never shows you that relationship, it just assumes that you'll presuppose one and accept it on face value. Which completely robs the scene of any legitimate emotional value, at least for me, because I don't think the murder of a father by his son can possibly mean anything if it's literally the first time you've ever seen them together. In order for the impact of that decision to be...well, impactful, you need to see the bond that is being severed, you need some reason to believe that there is love and pain and conflict shared between these two people.
But in the film, Han and his son have never spoken, they've never been in the same room as each other. We haven't even seen so much as a picture of them maybe having once been happy together, or a crestfallen look from Solo in the flashback to Kylo Ren's Jedi-slaughtering teen angst phase. We haven't seen them love each other, or hate each other, or try to reconcile and fail. These two characters have no real connection to each other beyond a little bit of clumsy exposition and the assumption that fathers and sons tend to like each other at least a little bit. As a result, Kylo Ren murdering his father wasn't the culmination of a real emotional struggle, it was a cheap gimmick designed to shock some meaning into a story, without having to waste time on actual human feelings or character development. If there had been one moment of interaction between the two, perhaps when Solo sees Ren carrying Rey into his spaceship, it would have gone a long way towards fixing the problem. Instead, we're left to project our own ideas of the father-son relationship onto one that never existed.
And worst of all, he dies completely without ceremony or recognition of how meaningful that moment was. Han Solo is one of the most iconic characters in the entire history of cinema, so his death should be a monumental event. So how is it handled? A crumpled body falls pitifully into the void, and everyone pretty much moves on with their lives. Chewy screams a bit, Leia looks sad in two shots, and then EVERYTHING IS FINE! The final lightsaber battle isn't about avenging Han's death, it's about applauding the (not at all surprising) revelation that Rey is the real heir apparent to the Jedi line instead of Finn. Once we've firmly established that she's a badass, the gang goes home and Han is almost completely forgotten. There is no funeral or memorial or kind words. The women hug it out, and quickly move on. Because who has time to mourn one father figure when a map to a new and better one has been discovered! Once Solo is dead, it's almost as though he never existed. Rey just steals his ship and his best friend, then confidently flies off in search of a guy who has isolated himself from all of human civilization, but still manages to keep his dress robes dry cleaned.
All in all, it was just too much disappointment wrapped up in one single character for me, and it retroactively ruined all of the enjoyment I'd managed to experience so far. I know that I'm reacting a bit like a petulant child, refusing to reconsider the validity of my first knee-jerk reaction. And I know that I'll probably calm down and see the film again eventually, and that maybe by then the sting will have faded enough that I can reappraise it with fresh eyes and an open mind. Maybe some day down the road I'll even learn to love the film like everyone else. But for right now, my Loss-O-Meter is stuck firmly on Anger, and it shows no signs of progressing.
I'm sure that no one who has bothered to read this far would agree with me, nor would ask them to. Even if we assume for the moment that I'm right and The Force Awakens is badly overrated, I wouldn't want to be responsible for opening anyone's eyes to that fact and bringing them down into the joyless mire of nerdy, nit-picking disappointment that I wallow in. If you can look at The Force Awakens and only see it for the amazing spectacle that it was, you're far better off living in your world of delusion than going through it as a brooding malcontent like me. And if by some off chance I have correctly assessed the film as a deeply flawed, painstakingly designed toy commercial that was soullessly designed by corporate committee to be too big to fail, then I can only hope that some day I'll be able to quiet the critical part of my brain and rejoin you all in a world of blissful ignorance where I can once again enjoy a good space battle without asking too many questions. Maybe when Episode VIII comes out...
-TC
P.S. If you haven't had enough of my meaningless thoughts, my first novel is available now! It's a bit dark, creepy, and weird, so you might not approve of it any more than this post, but it's at least a little bit funny from time to time.