Right Reason

 

All sheen. No mythos.

 

 

This review will be a series of spoilers. That being said, I think all who care about The Force Awakens have pretty much already gone to see the film. Star Wars' loyal fans are legion. Whatever may be the quality of the movie, The Force Awakens is still under the Star-Wars brand and is therefore a must-watch for a sizable portion of the population. Reviewing this movie from the point of view of providing spoiler-free advice about whether a movie-goer at the margins should spend her time and money to go see it is therefore largely an exercise in futility. Those margins scarcely exist. Much like how the Force is divided into the light side and the dark, we live in a world in which the population is divided between those who will go see any Star-Wars film—even if it were led by Jar Jar Binks—and those who care nothing for the franchise.

By and large, people made their decisions before reading any review. What people are wondering now is not whether they should go see The Force Awakens. They are now wondering whether the movie was a good movie. Moreover, they are wondering whether the movie was a good Star-Wars movie—and, yes, that distinction is valuable. What follows below is my attempt to answer that question and, with the internet as obsessed about any potential spoilers, let me take the opportunity to provide a spoiler warning: The Force Awakens shall be fully spoiled below. Then again, if you care, I really doubt you haven’t seen the movie yet.

Suiting the overly long nature of this review, I split up the review into two portions. The first is a ~1000-word review for those who just want my impressions of the movie as a whole without much supporting evidence. The second part is where I go into depth as to why I had those impressions. For those who don’t care for the exact arguments supporting my impressions, Part I will suffice. Nevertheless, The Force Awakens is, by the very nature of its franchise, a landmark film and it’s worth taking time analyzing its many moving pieces, even if that analysis may push an excessive length. For those who care about my opinion about those many moving pieces: Strap in, it’s going to be a pretty long read!

 

 

I)

I went into the theater not expecting much and I was still disappointed. More specifically, I walked into the theater less excited so much as curious how JJ Abrams and the writers would present their vision of Star Wars.* What I saw was a remake of A New Hope that pandered to its audience without adding much to Star Wars' mythology.

Having provided the mandatory spoiler warning at the top, I must admit that there is very little to actually spoil for know who are a bit plot savvy. Han dying was a foregone conclusion after Harrison Ford agreed to another Star-Wars movie; Kylo Ren being the son of Han and Leia was actually my educated guess knowing that the two appeared estranged in the trailers and knowing about Jacen Solo in the extended universe; and the rest of the movie follows A New Hope beat-by-beat, with a dash of The Return of the Jedi, along with hip Whedon-esque humor, added in for good measure. One could say that it was surprising that Rey, not Finn, turned out to be the force-sensitive protagonist, but her appearance at the center of the movie poster was the signal that revealed the truth behind Disney's well-intentioned misinformation. After all, the main protagonist to any one of Star Wars' main films will be Force-sensitive.  There is really only one genuine surprise in the movie. That surprise was that Luke Skywalker only appeared for the last thirty seconds, without uttering a word. I shall return to that plot-point later. For now, broad strokes will do.

 

If there is one compliment I can pay to all those who created The Force Awakens, it is that they completely understand the chemistry behind successful blockbusters. The movie is skillfully, as well as passionately, mediocre. JJ Abrams and the writers understand, as a matter of science, how to organize scenes, cast characters and construct story arcs. They know exactly what audiences want and they know how to craft a movie that will satisfy those appetites. Nothing is more clear and distinct in The Force Awakens than the sheen it is polished to. As a matter of pure cinematic chemistry, The Force Awakens has taken the place of Joss Whedon's The Avengers as the pinnacle case study and that is certain an achievement to be proud of. But herein lies my greatest reservation with the movie: It is simply blockbuster chemistry, sans artistic vision.

The creators were so busy making a perfect blockbuster that they forgot to put any unforeseen creativity into the movie. Much like Han Solos' death, the movie is very much a matter of protocol. Enter left, give an homage to the originals, leave right, or into a bottomless chasm, if your name is Harrison Ford. We know when we are supposed to cheer and feel nostalgic because the movie blatantly signals to us when that is supposed to be the case. Such thematic chemistry removes the possibility of any spontaneous moments that would not find an entry in JJ Abrams' textbook for almost plagiarizing other films.
Whatever one may think about the prequel trilogy, George Lucas always provided a creative vision. Indeed, those movies were unbridled creative vision, come what may. The creators of The Force Awakens played safe and simply gave fans of the original trilogy their childhood dreams back, ignoring the fact that Star Wars is not a mere children's movie, but an imaginative mythology. Even worst, the writers thought that they needed a movie to pander to the fans to apologize for the creative vision of the prequel trilogy.

Furthermore, the constant stream of ham-fisted references were annoying enough for me by the time that the climax came along, I was actually quite vexed with the amount of pandering in the movie. The reveal of the Millennium Falcon at the junk pit on Tatooine 2.0, complete with obvious orchestration signaling the moment that the midnight audience should cheer, was plenty evidence for me that the movie was not going to be subtle in its homages to the original trilogy. In line with that expectation, The Force Awakens never wasted a moment when it could explicitly inform the audience to feel nostalgic or to cheer at some prop calling back to the original trilogy. After all, there are theaters full of fan-boys that need to appeased, subtlety be damned.

In providing the audience with the Star-Wars movie their wanted and without much attention provided to world-building, the creators of The Force Awaken have failed the possibility of adding new and creative to the Star-Wars mythos. Instead, they merely pressed a re-set button so that fans can relive their love of the original trilogy. Being the third trilogy of the franchise, we should have seen the characters face new problems. The Battle of Endor was won, the Empire has fallen, a New Republic has risen and the Jedi have returned!

However, despite the fact that  these events have happened, the Star-Wars mythos has progressed beyond A New Hope, the writers still found every possible way to press the reset button on all the events that happened across the original trilogy. Is the Rebellion so utterly incapable of serving as an arm of conventional power that they remain a guerrilla force hiding out on another jungle planet despite having won the decisive Battle of Endor? Is Han Solo still an untrustworthy rogue? Are the Jedi still extinct? Everything is the same as it was in the beginning of A New Hope, except where it was the rubble of the Clone Wars, it is now the rubble of the Galactic Civil War; where it was Obi-Wan Kenobi serving as the last of the Jedi in exile sought after by Leia, it is now Luke Skywalker.

The consequences of The Return of the Jedi’s conclusion should have introduced problems that are completely distinct from those of the previous two trilogies and those problems, as evidenced by a legion of expanded-universe stories, provide plenty of imaginative plot points. The Force Awaken simply defaults to being a re-make of many of the plot points of the original trilogy. Compared to Timothy Zahn's marvelous Heir to the Empire, which was its own first installment of a trilogy, The Force Awakens is merely a boring and unimaginative fourth installment of a beloved series.

Disney may have birthed a new Marvel cinematic universe to churn out a steady, albeit mediocre, supply of films to satisfy its legion of fans. But in doing so, Disney may have placed the desire to appease a mob above the desire to see a creative vision realized. If the future movies serve to corroborate that impression, it will be a tragic, tragic thing indeed.

 

* If I had two things on my Star-Wars wish list it was for one of the three leads to succumb to the temptations of the Dark Side and for Han Solo not to die in this movie. The former would demonstrate that our new heroes were never safe from their adversaries, or their own weaknesses, and would create an interesting sub-arc for the trilogy. The latter was so that the obvious would not happen.

 

 

 

Alas, The Force Awakens doesn't stand on its own as a coherent plot. Why? Let me explain...

 

II)

Halfway through the movie, I would have said that the movie was a mediocre blockbuster, of the style of JJ Abrams' two previous mediocre blockbusters. By that point it was clear that, much like an adolescent without a sense of his own identity, The Force Awakens was copying every good idea that George Lucas had in A New Hope and The Return of the Jedi in the hope of being loved. But I was still waiting to see what ideas the writers would have for the conclusion of the film. Up until the climax, the movie cohered as a plot and did a fine enough job entertaining me. I was getting annoyed at the blatant use of homages to the originals to conjure a sense of nostalgia, but that itself would not make The Force Awakens fail at the scale I think it did. I would have still not liked the movie, but I could have at least admitted that it stood its own as a mere remake.

The climax was what placed this movie into the territory of being a terrible. It served to fully emphasize all of the movie's problems, mostly that it lacked any suspense or vision at all, as the movie suddenly switch gears into an unnecessary set of action sequences without delving into the problems it had set up for itself. What originality it had, the search for Luke in particular, was cast to the side until the climax was over. We left with mere a third Death-Star assault, complete with Leia looking upon a screen in a hidden rebel base on a jungle planet, Princess, sorry, General Leia staring at some display in that base along with C3-PO, Portkins 2.0, trench assault and having to fly into the Death Star, serve as the climax lacked any imagination. In a movie that was already Star Wars' Greatest Hits, the climax was completely lifted from two previous movies and it did not serve to actually push forwards the story established in the beginning of The Force Awakens. Moreover, both A New Hope and The Return of the Jedi did their climaxes better, because those events were created to suit the problems of those particular movies with their own arcs and characters. 

 

In A New Hope, the movie's climax is centered around the assault on the Death Star alone. Badly crafted, this scene could have been just ships flying around to blow up a massive station. However, the film is able to craft an action scene that creates a sense of stakes as the scene go on that enables the action to transcend mere light and motion. Rather than bouncing around between concurrent plotlines, A New Hope keeps the Battle of Yavin going for just around fifteen minutes and it greatly benefits from that decision. The tension ratchets up after each scene and every scene within the sequence as the Death Star moves ever closer the Rebel base. There is a palpable sense of dread as the Death Star approaches firing range and as the Rebel assault meets hurdles. As each Rebel attempt to attack the thermal exhaust pipe fails, that tension is ratcheted up by a further escalation of the stakes, whether it is by Darth Vader personally leading a squadron to engage the Rebels in ship-to-ship combat or Moff Tarkin refusing to prepare a shuttle for evacuation or by. That is only made possible by the movie focusing on this single sequence of events because the audience would otherwise not feel the tension. Indeed, the pivot role that George Lucas' wife played in essentially creating the trench sequence we know and love in the editing room.

Unlike in A New Hope,, the climax's action jumps around between plotlines in The Return of the Jedi: Lando in space, Luke on the second Death Star and Han and Leia on the surface. This inter-cutting of plotlines works because of the fact that it is the third part of a trilogy. The conflicts have been established and so have our sympathy for the heroes.
Since we were already invested in the conflict between all of the characters when the movie began, the filmmakers did not need to ratchet up the tension by sequential edits, as was necessary in A New Hope. The previous two movies in set up the stakes and why it is so important that our heroes succeed. The Return of the Jedi’s climax brings those stakes to the bank in a massive action scene. The audience understands the stakes each and every time Luke and Vader swing at each other. Because it had served as Lord Vader's flagship in the previous movie, we knew the great victory that was won by the destruction of the Imperial Super Star Destroyer.

Inter-cutting plotlines didn’t work in The Force Awakens because we don’t have a sense of what is at stake nor have we spent long enough with our heroes to want to see them succeed for anything more than the most shallow of motivations. Poe Dameron's plot suffers the most as a result of the stitching of concurrent plotlines together. Most of the dramatic action that the audience actually has an attachment to is happening within the Starkiller Base. There, Han, Chewie and Finn are trying to shut down the base's shields from within to prepare the way for Poe's assault on the bases weak point. (Yet another one of the plot points in A Force Awakens that I've never seen before.) Rey is also aboard Starkiller Base and her own effort to escape further cement's all the dramatic stakes within the base, not over it.  The attack on the Starkiller Base is lost within this sequence of events. As a result, Poe's assault was very much just motion and lights. Veewwww, pew, pew, pew. It was a Death-Star trench assault redux, a scintillating climax for the sake of redoing another movie’s scintillating climax, without any of the dramatic tension that made the 

Even as a matter of style over substance, The Force Awaken’s fails to have similarly an epic scale as A New Hope, or, for that matter, The Return of the Jedi. The climax of A New Hope may have had a grand scope in 1977, but special effects have gone a long way since then, no small thanks to Star Wars. In an era of so impressive computer-generated imagery as our own, why the writers settled with a mere thirty or so ships assaulting the third Death Star is beyond me. Was that all the Resistance could muster? They could have easily had a pretty impressive fleet-to-fleet battle at the climax and I do not know why they did not make that choice. After all, the Battle of the Starkiller Base was a perfect opportunity for a spectacle involving a massive battle between a Resistance fleet trying to quickly get in past the First Order's garrison to deploy fighters to destroy the base's weak point. It would have even been an opportunity to put Ackbar back at the helm of the flagship! If the Resistance’s very existence were truly threatened, as it was in the movie, would it not send in every asset to assist its fighters on the ground? One may say that the creators are saving massive fleet battles for a future installment, and that may very well be the case.

As it stands, the opening minutes of The Revenge of the Sith has a much more impressive action scene in the Battle over Coruscant than anything in The Force Awakens, despite the jump in technology since then and the opportunity for fleet battles within the former film. Unlike the Battle of Starkiller Base, the Battle over Coruscant is an action scene that actually inspires awe at the scale of the visual.

 

Further neutralizing the sense of spectacle, at least for someone obsessed with the mythos, was that, unlike in either of the two previous trilogies, there is really only one new ship in the entire film and there are no new ship designs for the different factions fighters. One can easily distinguish the dogfights of, say, the Battle over Coruscant from that of the Battle of Endor by the ships involved in both conflicts alone. Those differences are not merely a matter of eye-candy alone. They also serve to emphasize that the trilogies both happen during different era’s of the Star-Wars mythos.

As anyone designing a real-time strategy game knows, differences between factions need to emphasized in the design of their units. Those differences serve as a visual cue of the differences between the factions. The dogfights of The Force Awakens, were merely more X-Wings versus TIE-fighter. That is a problem beyond the fact that it is something that audiences have already seen plenty of in the original trilogy. Instead, they serve to merely make the Resistance the Rebellion 2.0 and the First Order the Galactic Empire 2.0. The visuals do not signal that we are in a different era of Star Wars and that the Resistance and the First Order are themselves characters to the plot just as their predecessors were. Of all the ships in The Force Awakens, the only one that seemed to signal a different era was Kylo Ren's transport shuttle. However, even his flagship, The Finalizer, while certainly having an identity of its own as well as a rather snazzy name, does not appear to be a generation jump as the Venator-class and Imperial-class Star Destroyers were.

 

The climatic light-saber duel, which we all expect from a Star-Wars movie, was similarly disappointing. It really did look like children whacking sticks together, albeit with better special effects. Some call it ‘realistic’ and ‘gritty’. Myself, I don’t understand why one wants to watch a choreographed action scene that looks as unimpressive as that light-saber duel. With at least some training in how to use his weapon, Kylo Ren could have at least pulled off some pretty fancy moves, befitting his status as the movie’s big baddie. Alas, like his opponent, he only had child’s acumen in smashing his sword into his opponent with sloppy broad strokes. When one is in a movie theater to watch space wizards duel with swords of light, I don’t think it absurd that one should expect some stylized violence. To forgo choreography in favor of watching children in any backyard playing, albeit with better special effects, is a silly cinematic choice, at least with my own tastes.

Both The Phantom Menace and The Revenge of the Sith marked themselves out with a style of violence that raised light-saber duels above any other movie fight and ensured that, by the style alone, one would know that one was looking at a fight from Star Wars. With The Force Awakens, that style is gone and, replacing the light-sabers wielding for plain steel swords, one could be watching a fight scene from a dozen other films. As far as what constitutes a 'realistic' light-saber duel, I must confess ignorance of what is the proper measure of realism in a fight between space wizards. Still, knowing that JJ Abrams was going to make the violence more ‘realistic’, I was looking forwards to witnessing the light-saber duel to at least test my biases.  

Alas, I just didn’t enjoy Abrams' grounded realism as much as I did the choreographed style of the prequels. Obi-Wan Kenobi versus Anakin Skywalker is still my favorite duel in the Star-Wars mythos, though I may be cheating in choosing a fight between a master of Soresu and Djem So respectively. When I think of space wizards dueling, that is the fight that I think of. Some may say that it is too acrobatic and too choreographed, I say it’s a movie and I want to witness stylized fighting between space wizards! Mixed-martial arts, not Star Wars, is what I watch when I want to watch realistic violence.

 

The next problem with the plot that comes to a head during the climax, or at least immediately after the climax, is its deus ex D2. Suiting a plot only driven forwards by chance and coincidence, plus a heavy dose of winks to the camera, Luke is only found because the writers allowed for Luke to be found. The characters' actions had scarcely any involvement whatsoever.

Before the climax, we learn that data is necessary from R2-D2, yet the droid has been in a state of hibernation ever since Luke absconded. The Luke plotline is then forgotten in order to fit the movie into the rails of A New Hope. No longer is it the information contained within the droids that’s driving the plot forwards, now it’s the threat of yet another world-destroying weapon. Yet in the opening Star-Wars crawl, The Force Awakens sets up a movie about the search for Luke, not about the threat of some superweapon. We are told that:

With the support of the REPUBLIC,
General Leia Organa leads a brave RESISTANCE.
She is desperate to find her
brother Luke and gain his
help in restoring peace and
justice to the galaxy.

Leia has sent her most daring
pilot on a secret mission
to Jakku, where an old ally
has discovered a clue to
Luke’s whereabouts . . . .

 

The first third of the movie follows this mission of bringing the map detailing Luke's location to the Resistance. We are led to believe, at least I was, that finding Luke is what matters to the story we are about to witness.

The galaxy is hurt, the reason why the galaxy is hurt being left unexplained but it clearly has something to do with the First Order. For some reason, again unexplained, finding Luke will heal the galaxy. At least in A New Hope, the reason why the plans to the Death Star were important was rather self-evident, and . With the plans to the Death Star in hand, it was not inconceivable that the Rebellion could find a weakness and exploit it to destroy the Empire's powerful, and certainly very expensive, battlestation. This threat was even emphasized in a conference scene between high-ranking Imperial officials so that the audience would know the stakes if the protagonists were to fail in their mission.
There is no such intuition or information given in The Force Awakens as to why finding Luke matters for the Resistance. (I'm guessing it's a story for a different time.) Instead, we are finding Luke because Luke is important because the movie says so. That being said, Luke's importance could have clearly be explained in the climax in which Luke is found. Right? Wrong.

With the plot of The Force Awakens being largely limited to a remake of A New Hope, once the map to Luke's location reaches the Resistance, the movie immediately changes gears, away from the find-Luke plot into something entirely different. The map to is incomplete and the information needed to complete it is beyond the characters grasp. Now they must deal with a more important threat: The New Order has tracked down the Resistance's secret base and are now, of course, their superweapon is now pointed at that secret base. The plotline suddenly diverts to suit the ebb and flow of A New Hope. The Rebellion, sorry Resistance now has to launch an assault on the bad guy's superweapon in order to save the day. Although the Death-Star assault suits the plotline of A New Hope, being a climax promised in the opening crawl, it does not suit the plotline of The Force Awakens.

To suddenly be bait-and-switched into the climax being yet another Death-Star assault was therefore disappointing. It is disappointing not because we were all expecting to see plenty of Luke in the movie, at least I was not. It was disappointing because the movie set up the pay-off of seeing more of Luke and of figuring out more about why he absconded in the opening crawl and the first act of the film, only to abandon that plotline when it suited the movie as a remake. Instead of getting the promised pay-off, we are left with an announcement to come back in two years. Had the third Death-Star assault been forgone in favor of a climax that focused on finding Luke, the movie would have worked much better. Much like Obi-Wan Kenobi in A New Hope, Luke could have been a device for informing the audience about the hurt state of the galaxy and, doing so, would have greatly expanded the possibilities for world-building within the movie.
Furthermore, from an editing point of view, the Luke’s reveal was also unnecessarily anti-climatic. There was no in-plot reason to show Luke Skywalker, since there was no surprise within the scene. We all know, and all the characters know, what awaits us at the end. After getting the map, quite literally ex machina, the heroes know what await them and their journey is so uneventful that it is done in mere seconds—yet another instance of the lack of any sense of time or space in an Abrams flick. Luke only exists there to tease the audience. He doesn't serve to advance the story at all and so his existence in The Force Awakens, despite the big mystery set up in the opening crawl, exists beyond the fourth wall. He is but only a wink and a nod from the writers and the director to the audience. They knew that the audience wanted to see Master Skywalker and so he is inserted into the movie. He really could have been removed and the entire problem of the anti-climax would have been solved, thus further illustrating the problematic nature of The Force Awakens' very construction: It does not exist in its own world, but a world colored by the lustful desire to elicit responses from the fans.

 

 

Moving onto characters, I must admit that I am hitherto unimpressed the new characters added to the mythos. Han Solo and Chewbacca were great, and they had a much larger role that I was expecting, but neither of the two served to push the plot forwards much, nor do they similarly serve to expand the mythos. I would have much preferred to see them in a much more marginal role so that the new characters could have more time along with the plot.

 

Of those characters, Poe Dameron was the one I liked the most, but he is also a simple character archetype: Sly soldier who moonlights as a secret agent. He was plenty charismatic and left me wanting to see more of him. But there simply wasn’t a lot of him in the movie.

 

Finn was serviceable. Going into the movie, I thought that the entire idea of a black stormtrooper to play against the established character of who the Imperials are. They are Nazis in space. Their characterization really was that simple. To me, thinking of a black stormtrooper is as weird as thinking that a black man served in the SS. To think of a black man amongst their ranks is to actually make them less evil. The Imperials are supposed to be a bunch of monolithic pasty white men, content in the superiority of their Aryan skull-shape. That being said, the movie actually explains, for the most part at least, the reasoning behind why Finn was a stormtrooper and that reasoning was good enough for me. For just a moment, The Force Awakens added a detail to the Star Wars mythos. Even better, the detail was played straight without a wink at the camera.
Getting back to Finn’s character, I never really bought into his change of heart nor was I impressed at the fact he was never allowed to actually be an agent of evil. On the former topic, I just never believe that Finn would go from a soldier conditioned to serve as a stormtrooper into a traitor to that cause in the series of events that happened. For one thing, what seeded doubt in his heart was not watching an atrocity, but witnessing another stormtrooper die and paint his blood upon his own helmet. On top of that, from a history-of-warfare point of view, the atrocity that happened in the movie’s first scene wasn't really all that atrocious. Liquidating unruly villages was standard operating procedure in the Eastern Front during the Second World War. Christoper R Browning’s history of Reserve Police Battalion 101 in Ordinary Men demonstrates how easy it was for the Germans during that period to condition even middle-aged men taken from civilian life into committing atrocities orders of magnitude worse than sacking a village.
Yet it was not Finn’s change of heart that I found most flawed. Although I did not buy into that course of events, I was still able to go forwards with the plot. The genuine problem with a the stormtrooper-turned-good plot was that Finn was never allowed to be an active agent of evil. The opening was his first combat operation and he had served before as a janitor, distant from any of the New Order’s evil. Yes, the only black man that have yet to know serving the Empire, new or old (at least in this canon), was a janitor. As fellow stormtroopers were sent out to murder innocent civilians and to fight against the New Republic, much like how black GI's during WW2 primarily served as in support roles such as driving trucks, FN-2003 was safely behind the lines committing himself to the bland and unoffensive job of keeping the Starkiller Base clean for the Übermenschen.
Much like how Lucas tampered with A New Hope to explicitly depict Han not shooting first under the fear that a man who shot first would be beyond the moral event horizon, the writers of The Force Awakens ensures that we know that Finn never actually did anything bad. Rather than being a stormtrooper would could have very well murdered innocent civilians, we are told quite definitely that Finn is just some ordinary guy, which serves to undercut the virtue of Finn’s change of heart. Finn's involvement in the First Order was so harmless as to be negligible. Even worse, his identity as a stormtrooper takes a full couple of minutes to shake off and his lack of sympathy with his former faction is never in doubt, which further serves to completely downplay any dramatic tension with his turn-of-heart arc. All that being said, I do look forwards in seeing if more can be done with his backstory in the upcoming movies.

 

Before discussing the lead, I do wish to say a bit about Captain Phasma. For all the marketing setting her up as a female antagonist to be feared, Phasma turned out to be little more than a coward. I don’t mind that she wasn’t used much in the movie. This is the first part of a trilogy, after all, and some characters do need to be seeded into the plot for future use. The problem is that she was a coward. The moment that Chewie, Finn and Han pointed a gun at her head, she betrayed the New Order that we had been led to believe she was a zealous soldier for. I would expect such behavior from a mere conscript, but not from someone who is a true-believer. That act of treasonous cowardice completely undercut her characterization as a fearsome soldier. We would expect a generic masculine military antagonist played by, say, Arnold Schwarzenegger or Clint Eastwood to be willing to die before lowering the shields of the Starkiller Base, not so with Gwendoline Christie’s Captain Phasma. Much like the movie she was in, the character was all polish, no substance. If she had done such an action in the search for Han Solo in The Empire Strikes Back, she would have been summarily executed by Lord Vader.

 

Finally getting to the topic of the lead, Rey, outside of the varnish of being a likable power girl, she is really just a Mary Sue. Certainly, she is not dissimilar to the parade of Gary Stus and Mary Sues across JJ Abram's treatment of Star Trek. The director’s treatment of the male leads Kirk and Khan, in particular, absolutely deserve the same criticisms that I shall level on Rey. However, this is neither a review of Star Trek nor Into Darkness, neither or which I would heap much praise on. Instead this is a review of The Force Awakens and so Rey, rather than Kirk, Khan or a gaggle of JJ Abrams’ other characters from that franchise, is the target in my sights.
Within the taxonomy of characters in literature, there are at least three conditions to be met for a character to be a Gary Stu/ Mary Sue. The first is that they must be great at everything they do. Give Gary Stu a task, and he will carry it out brilliantly, even if he has had no prior straining. The entire cast of JJ Abrams’ Star Trek pretty much checks this condition off by their swift, and efficacious, promotion from students to the crew of the Federation’s flagship. Secondly, that character must lack any culpable flaw. The Gary Stu is a perfect student at Hogwarts, or at least a wonderful Quidditch player. Thirdly, that character must be a new character in an established universe that receives the praise of the established characters within that universe. Gary Stu is not only a perfect student, or a wonderful Quidditch player, he is also a member of House Gryffindor beloved by Harry, Ron and Hermoine.
Yes, we all like to imagine ourselves as such characters, but we also know that doing so is self-serving. The world doesn’t actually revolve around ourselves as it does Gary Stu. Despite that self-awareness, we still frequently find ourselves wishing that the entire world would just stop to adore us in our own excellence. We are only human, after all. Gary Stus are a troubling literary category because they fuel that egotistical escapism. It is far better for ourselves to be our own impartial spectators, to recognize that the characters we sympathize with should reflect our own flaws and that they should have to overcome those flaws to improve themselves.

Rey checks off all of those conditions for being a Mary Sue. She is unbelievable excellent at all the tasks that she is met with, she has no culpable character flaws, and she is a newly added character in an existing universe admired by the characters within that universe. As a vehicle of wish-fulfillment, Rey is designed perfectly. New at the helm of the Millennium Falcon, she is nevertheless able to pilot it in a dogfight to evade maneuverable First-Order TIE-fighters. She is then able to repair the Millennium Falcon and gains Han Solo's gushing approval upon doing so. Within hours of hearing about the existence of the Force, she is able to successfully Jedi mind trick stormtroopers to plot her own escape from Starkiller base. Despite being a valuable prisoner anybody would have had multiple layers of security assigned to, she is able to break out of possibly the most heavily fortified base in the entire universe. With no training in how to use a light-saber, she is able to best a dark lord who had trained under Master Skywalker himself. Some of those accomplishments can be explained away; for instance, I can fully believe that a scavenger can be a great climber and great at jury-rigging space ships. However, taken as a whole, all of his incredible accomplishments drive Rey into Mary-Sue territory.

 

One of the aspects of story that Lucas perfectly understood in both of his trilogies was internal conflict. It really is the internal conflicts, rather than simply the face-off with external threats, that define a protagonist and allow that protagonist to grow over the course of her story. Luke Skywalker was a hero because he was able to overcome his own internal conflicts. Anakin Skywalker was a tragic hero because he was not able to overcome his own internal conflicts. Rey has no internal conflicts to speak of. Her only conflict is to transcend victimhood and that is achieved within minutes within the movie.

Furthermore as of the end of The Force Awakens, Rey has already seemed to have reached enlightenment, by virtue of letting the Force in. Whereas Luke had to overcome his doubts and whininess to gain a clearness of mind in his training in Dagobah, Rey has already found clearness of mind, as evidenced by her letting the Force in during her fight with Kylo Ren. As someone who surely believed in the spiritual themes rife in Star Wars, Lucas understood that the Jedi were an order of monks who needed lengthy training to master their powers, Abrams and the writers default to a secular notion of simply 'letting it in'. 
A hero can only be as great as the challenges that she overcomes. Before he could become a true Jedi, Luke had to emerge from his hero's journey, which included many, many missteps, before he could overcome Vader and his Emperor. Rey overcame whatever obstacles the plot put before her with ease, and that ease erodes away her heroism. The self-determination and virtue that an impartial spectator applauds can only be displayed under difficult circumstances. As of the conclusion of the first part to the new trilogy, Rey had yet to face a genuine trial in her path to becoming a Jedi and the ease of her path is at odds with the hero's journey that she is supposed to be on.
Maybe the next two parts will see Rey genuinely broken, as all true heroes must be in their journeys, but The Force Awakens should be able to stand on its own two legs, just as A New Hope was able to. By the end of that movie, we all knew Luke had to overcome obstacles, including his own doubts and personality. Those obstacles may not have been as dramatic as those in the sky-city of Bespin or in the Emperor's throne room, but they were challenges nevertheless. There are simply no parallels for Rey in her story and that should be irksome for those who want a genuinely legendary female protagonist.

 

No one should settle for bad characters. Settling for bad female characters because they are female only serves to feed the internet trolls who believe that the introduction of female characters into their beloved mythologies will ruin the stories contained therein. Being content with a lead female being a Mary Sue serves to corroborate that point and, in the long run, to feed the trolls! We should all want great stories with great characters, no matter their race and gender. That being said, we do live in a time in which bland white male protagonists dominate. In a better world, we could say that it does not matter whether a protagonist has a certain race or gender. However, we are not in that world now.
A Star Wars with a cast of minority characters is a step to that better world. The decision to cast a female lead and a black main beside her is therefore laudable. It helps us get beyond that world of bland male protagonists, which really are actually quite boring in their own right.
Nevertheless, we still live in a world good enough that we should not be willing to settle for any minority characters. Instead, we should want to same level of characterization for our minority characters as are given to while males. With Rey, we should expect to see a woman who struggles and overcomes both external and internal conflicts, just as we got with Luke Skywalker. Whereas Luke was a fallible human being who had to overcome his own internal conflicts to become a Jedi, Rey was a Mary Sue, who came ready to instantly soak up the lessons of the Force, and no one should be applauding the writers for that. Instead, we should be upset, just as we would have upset been if Rey had been yet another princess to rescue. In media virtus stat.

Questions do abound about Rey. Those questions may be answered satisfactorily in the next two movies. However, they are questions that have direct relevance on The Force Awakens. They should have been answered in this movie so that it could stand on its own as a good movie. Without good answers, we are left with a Mary Sue who could have been a much better character, a character whose hero’s journey an impartial spectator could have actually sympathized with. Within The Force Awakes alone, considered as its own movie, Rey is a cardboard-cutout power girl that we all, be we feminists or lovers of good plots in general, should be disappointed with. Whether that changes in future movies does not matter for this review, for it did not matter for my enjoyment of the movie and my ability to sympathize with Rey. 

 

 

As of now, The Force Awakens is being showered with acclaim and positive reviews. As a blockbuster that understands how to manipulate the pent-up nostalgia for the original movies and knows the chemistry underlying box-office success, that is not surprising. Indeed, it would be more surprising if this movie were not a well-crafted film. That being said, The Force Awakens is ultimately just a stale fourth installment in a beloved series. It's very difficult to create an imaginative blockbuster these days. Imaginative movies must buck conventions and go out on their own paths. Very often, as in the case of Jupiter Ascending this year, an imaginative movie fails, both as a movie and as a money-maker.
Being a Star-Wars movie, and therefore guaranteed to make dump-trucks of money, The Force Awakens was a perfect platform to bring a creative and ambitious story, one that could have launched an entire new mythology of new stories, As the first installment of a new trilogy, the writers and directors had an opportunity for creating something new that had a separate identity from the two previous trilogies, just as the prequels had a separate identity from the original trilogy. Instead, they took the opportunity to play it safe and to pander to fans who would have watched the next two movies come what may.
In doing so, they failed the promise of Star Wars and, as a true-believing Star-Wars fan, I can scarcely be more disappointed. Say what you will about the prequel trilogy, at least George Lucas brought us something imaginative, something that would have been impossible to make if it did not have the Star-Wars brand buttressing its sales. JJ Abrams and the writers of The Force Awakens simply gave us a purposefully completely derivative and completely mediocre blockbuster, a movie that is already difficult to differentiate from Abram's Star Trek and will simply fade into dust once newer, shiner, and more hip space films find their way to a theater near you.