Occam's Razor

I’m hanging with relatives in Maryland and hoping to see the sun before we leave tomorrow. Little sign of sun today but there has been plenty of rain instead, much of it torrential. Mostly I’m chilling with siblings, but I was able to see my father and stepmother, and it’s good to see a nephew and distant brother-in-law as well. Much of yesterday was spent back in Northern Virginia with our daughter. We could not resist driving by our former residence and noted the new owners have been busy ripping out the shrubbery. Got to let it go.

But we also took in the latest Star Wars movie, Star Wars: The Force Awakens in 3-D IMAX, dodging raindrops coming and going, of course. Although old enough to have seen these movies before they had roman numerals assigned to them, the Star Wars genre has done little for me. Its story is timeless: good triumphing against overwhelming evil, just with an outer space theme. What originally annoyed me were mostly the robots, but also how unfaithful it was both to science and science fiction. There was no denying its popularity, since here I was again in a theater nearly forty years later to see the latest reboot of the series, this time by J.J. Abrams who successfully gave us back the Star Trek genre. If anyone could breathe some new life into this tired genre, J.J. could.

And yet Abrams main contribution is to make a new episode feel a lot like the first movie. This is excellent news for Disney, which now owns the franchise, and which needs to derive maximum profits for its shareholders from subsequent installments. J.J. delivered that, as evidenced by all the agog younger faces enthusiastically exiting our showing. Not that J.J. stayed entirely in the comfortable realm. He introduced John Boyega as the stormtrooper turned resistence fighter Finn. Boyega happens to be black, but that turned out to be annoying to some, who like their good guys with white skin. J.J. added lots of females including Daisey Ridley as Rey, probably the chief character in this latest incarnation of this space opera. She looks great but it’s hard to make a living salvaging parts from crashed spacecraft on her planet. Fortunately she quickly encounters Finn and the newest cute robot BB8, which is pivotal to the plot. The newest version of The Dark Side needs the droid because it has a map that will let it find Luke Skywalker and destroy what is left of the Resistence.

Unquestionably, if you are into this franchise then you are going to enjoy this “episode” enormously, much the way J.J.’s Star Trek reboot tickled us Trekkies. It will help you overlook some of the reboot’s downsides. Mostly it is too faithful to the source material, too comfortable, which has the effect of an insulin rush from eating too many Christmas cookies. What you don’t get is much in the way of nutrition. So you should feel very entertained but sort of empty inside, at least if like me you are not a member of this collective. You want more but it’s not quite there.

But you do get nostalgia, including Harrison Ford reprising his role as Han Solo, Carrie Fisher reprising Leia, but now as a general instead of a Princess, but boy they sure do look old. Luke (Mark Hamill) literally only shows up in the last minute of the film, never says a word, but does have a cool beard and looks vaguely like Jesus Christ. BB8 is at least more loveable than C3PO and R2D2 that reprise their “roles” too.

So this is a safe Star Wars sequel faithful to George Lucas’s original version at least. It’s just hard to feel a little resentment that J.J. didn’t plumb some new Star Wars depths. Instead we get an updated version of the 1970’s Star Wars movie.

3.3 out of 4-stars.

[xrr rating=3.3/4]