Thanks, I Hate It: The Force Awakens

The Force Awakens, J. J. Abrams' love letter to 1977's A New Hope, clips along pretty well. It has a few thrilling, joyful scenes. The leads are tremendously charming. Beyond that it's a bog-standard 21st century Disney blockbuster which, like the conglomerate's endless reel of "live-action" remakes, relies on audience nostalgia and brand loyalty to act as a kind of scaffold for its essential formlessness. It's less interesting as a movie than it is as part of a dreary moment in cinematic history, but it does have one element shitty enough to warrant a closer look: the attack on Starkiller Base.

A New Hope's climactic scene, the attack run on the Death Star by a desperate handful of fighter pilots, is perhaps the most tightly and compellingly paced sequence in action cinema. Editors Marcia Lucas, Paul Hirsch, and Richard Chew capitalize on the clear physical goals of the attack run and the discrete linear space of the trench in which it occurs to build toward a stunning moment of catharsis, the entire movie tapering into it with relentless focus. Tarkin stands on the observation bridge, watching the Rebel base come into view. The Death Star's superlaser slowly powers up, a sequence we've seen once before and can roughly measure out in our heads. Luke and the other Rebel pilots, their numbers shrinking as Darth Vader picks them off one by one, hurtle toward an infinitesimal chance of victory.

The Force Awakens rehashes this sequence and comprehensively fails to capture any of its tension or clarity. The first and broadest difference is that the assault on Starkiller Base is intercut with Han Solo, Rey, Chewbacca, and Finn infiltrating the installation to sabotage its cooling system and expose a vital piece of machinery to the X-wing pilots led by Poe Dameron. The split here between desperate action and family drama is one that might have yielded fruit in a more interesting director's hands, but in Abrams's it repeatedly kneecaps the action and deflates the drama. The physical dimensions of the mission are likewise muddled, taking place in a Star Fox 64-esque aerial arena around the heat exchange element the saboteurs are trying to expose. The pilots are immediately at their goal and must wait for the story on the ground to catch up with them before proceeding.

Even the explosion of the base itself is delayed for minutes on end after Poe delivers the fatal missile, which reads more as a pacing pile-up necessitated by Rey and Kylo Ren's lightsaber duel than a studied dramatic choice. In A New Hope Luke's tremendous exhalation as the torpedoes vanish into the Death Star's exhaust port comes just moments before the space station explodes, a release of tension as much for the audience as for the character. Poe's achievement feels by contrast inconsequential, isolated from the action and conflict around it. The problem isn't that The Force Awakens is aping A New Hope's climax, it's that it swiped the structure without understanding the craftsmanship behind it.