There’s been a lot of stuff said about the Star Wars sequel trilogy, so I thought I’d add my own thoughts here. I know I’m late to the party and a lot of what I’ll say has been covered before, but I wasn’t in the Star Wars fandom back in 2015, so didn’t take part in those discussions.

I’ve loved the original trilogy for as long as I can remember, but I wasn’t a hardcore fan of the franchise when The Force Awakens came out, so didn’t see it in theatres. In fact, it was several years before I saw it and was already aware of a lot of the negativity that surrounded the movie.

My initial reaction to the film can be summed up like this: ‘Well that was underwhelming. Now they’ve gotten the set up out of the way, though, maybe the next movie will be better.’ Then The Last Jedi happened…

But first, to deal with Episode VII. If I were a YouTuber, it would probably be easier to do a five hour reaction video breaking down all the problems with this movie, but for the sake of conciseness, here are my main complaints.

New Heroes for Old

Rey, Finn and Poe are the new characters introduced in the movie, and they’re meant to be the main ones, but there’s a problem. Han and Leia are back from the original trilogy, so there’s something of a competition for screentime. It didn’t need to be like this, as Star Wars has always balanced older and younger characters, take Obi Wan in A New Hope, but here the new characters are seriously underdeveloped. The original heroes have been taken back to where they were at the start of Episode IV, and the new additions don’t get anywhere near the development they deserve.

Is Rey a Mary Sue? Maybe, but that’s not the argument I’d make. I think she’s a badly written character who comes off as dull. For example, in A New Hope, Luke Skywalker wants to leave Tatooine. He’s idealistic and thinks he can change the galaxy. The hologram of Leia asking for help is enough to get him craving adventure, but he almost doesn’t leave until the death of his aunt and uncle means there’s no reason for him to stay.

In contrast, Rey doesn’t want to leave Jakku as she thinks her parents will return. She’s also incredibly good natured, but being a scavenger she has no reason to be so altruistic, and it seems she was designed to be as good as possible with no logical explanation for her character. Things like her piloting or skills with a lightsaber can be explained away to a certain extent, but what makes Rey dull is that she doesn’t have the flaws and failings of the best heroes, and comes off as a kind of Doc Savage character who can do everything. If Han Solo had just said, ‘Sure, I’ll help rescue the princess and destroy the Death Star. No payment needed,’ he wouldn’t have had the journey from rogue to hero that defines him.

This isn’t helped by the conflicting story being told throughout the sequels. I don’t believe there was any plan where the trilogy was going as it was made. There seems to be no sense that J.J. Abrams was building up to the reveal that Rey was a Palpatine. It makes no sense considering what we see in TFA and TLJ. Maybe they had a plan that got changed by Rian Johnson, but it seems they just made it up as they went along.

The next big character is Finn. Now, the idea of a stormtrooper who defects isn’t something we’ve seen onscreen before, but it’s so badly handled, you have to feel sorry for John Boyega. Why is he so incompetent in his first battle? Wouldn’t Kylo Ren want the very best to accompany him? And why didn’t his conditioning work?

The fact he’s selfish to begin with and comes to realise that his new friends are the most important thing to him is at least some kind of character arc, but it’s constantly turned to comedy by making him a joke. Why would a stormtrooper be a janitor on Starkiller Base? Surely a dark backstory would make him all the more interesting, similar to Agent Kallus in Star Wars: Rebels. In fact, there’s even a better exploration of this in Star Wars: Resistance, with Tam Revora, who signs up as a First Order pilot out of idealism, but soon becomes disillusioned with it.

His lack of development (or even reversal of it) in the following movies doesn’t help either. But he’s never given the respect he deserves right from the start. If the Star Wars Encyclopedia contains an entry for ‘Wasted Potential’, it should just be a picture of FN-2187.

As for the last of the sequel triumvirate, that’s Poe Dameron. He’s an ace pilot and, well, that’s it. He’s there because Star Wars needs an ace pilot. From the off he’s badly handled, with his dialogue with Kylo Ren at the beginning of the movie some of the worst, that only breaks down Ren’s already fragile villain persona. I wonder if this kind of thing was influenced by the Marvel movies being made around the same time? A lot of J.J.’s directing style does seem to be ‘borrowing’ from other places, then throwing a lot of stuff around to see what sticks.

As for the legacy characters, there’s not much to be said here that hasn’t been done to death. Leia isn’t harmed much. She’s still a rebel leader, heading the fight against tyranny as always, but there’s a missed opportunity to show more of the politics she has to fight against, and the fact her Jedi powers suddenly appear in TLJ seems odd.

As for Han Solo, it’s a different story. He’s returned to being a smuggler, without his ship, without his family, without the development he had throughout the originals, and is now a sad old man, similar to how that other famous Harrison Ford character, Indiana Jones would be treated a few years later.

He’s a sideline character who’s only there to die, but what for? His death doesn’t change Kylo Ren. Is doesn’t serve as a rallying point for the Resistance. It doesn’t stop Leia from continuing the fight. It’s just a complete waste of a legacy character.

Villains? What Villains?

Right from the start, I found Kylo Ren to be a stupid, whiny, brattish, inferior, insufferable, ineffectual, unmenacing little piece of bantha poodoo. This might be his character, as a cheap rip off of Darth Vader, but there’s nothing scary about a child who smashes up his room when he doesn’t get what he wants. The best thing Han could have done is given him a slap and told him to go to his room, and it probably would have worked. There’s no menace, no feeling this is a force to be reckoned with. he’s just lame. The only thing that makes this worse is that the other villains here are no better.

Snoke is an interesting bad guy. A big face on a hologram who seems to be in charge and has some power, a bit like the Emperor in The Empire Strikes Back. This might have been OK if he hadn’t been killed off in TLJ before we get to know anything at all about him. I know this isn’t The Force Awakens problem, but it is still a problem, and means there’s no point to him in this movie.

All of this is compounded by the fact that General Hux is a silly shouty man on a soapbox who’s got an inferiority complex and is constantly being humiliated. His rivalry with Ren isn’t played in a good way, like both of them competing to be the very best, hoping to gain their leader’s attention, but more like a couple of high school kids who think they’re in charge here.

I’m not sure there’s even any point mentioning Captain Phasma, who had an interesting mini-arc with Finn that ended in her falling down a hole (a plot hole, maybe!) in The Last Jedi before she’d done anything useful.

Other than that, there are a few interesting characters in the film. Maz Kanata, for instance, and BB-8 (who doesn’t love a droid?) but that’s about it.

A Long Time Ago…

With the characters out of the way, it’s time to look at the story, which is really a play-by-play remake of the first Star Wars movie.

It’s passed into fandom legend that when George Lucas had watched the movie, he’s reported to have been disappointed with it, saying the filmmakers had done nothing new, and that’s true. Now, I know that Star Wars has always called back to previous movies (it’s like poetry, it rhymes), but the problem here is that there is *nothing* new. Sand planet, would-be Jedi, cocky ace pilot, Han Solo, Starkiller Base, mentor dies, guy in a black mask, First Order/Empire. It’s all the same, and not in a good way. It doesn’t do anything new or exciting. Look at the past films and they all deliver something original. The Gungan vs Trade Federation ground battle. The hundred-Jedi arena fight in Episode II. The asteroid field in ESB. And not just in the looks, but in the storytelling and characters.

There isn’t a hook in the story. It’s all boring and without the feeling that the other Star Wars movies have of adventure. Look at Luke on Tatooine, like every young kid, dreaming of escaping from his boring life to go and have adventures in space. What is the central drive of this story? It isn’t really Rey, because she wants to stay on Jakku and wait for her parents. It’s not Finn, because he’s mostly ignored by the plot. And it certainly isn’t Poe, who’s forgotten about for half of the movie after crashing his TIE fighter. It would have been much better to bring these three unlikely heroes together on Jakku and have them find a way to work through their differences for the greater good, perhaps with Rey reluctantly joining them after she’s forced to flee her home because of the First Order.

The worldbuilding just isn’t that good either. We don’t know the power of the First Order. Is it a paramilitary organisation? Do they have political power? Are they terrorists? How does the New Republic view them? In A New Hope, we see the Empire’s omnipotence in the way they stretch all the way to backwaters like Tatooine, and Tarkin saying that the Emperor has dissolved the Senate, clearly showing that there’s no limit to what they’re willing to do. They are the big power here and nothing will stand in their way, which makes the Rebellion’s struggle all the more powerful. We don’t get that with the First Order or the Resistance, though, which makes it hard to get invested in the world when you don’t know its limits.

It’s hard to look at this movie without considering how the other sequels failed as well, but my reaction to it on first viewing was more underwhelming than anything. I didn’t hate it, and after rewatching it, I still don’t. It feels like it wants to fly at times but there’s a lack of creativity and originality holding it back and the two sequels do nothing to rescue its legacy. I’m not sure what prompted Kathleen Kennedy to give control to J.J. Abrams. He isn’t the kind of director who can deal with something as large as Star Wars.

Is The Force Awakens a bad movie then? Kind of. It’s not great, but there is some potential in it. The character development and worldbuilding are lacking, but it’s certainly better than, say, Rebel Moon. It can’t be judged as just another sci-fi movie though. It’s a Star Wars movie, and as one, it fails miserably. For what it’s worth, if The Last Jedi had built up on the base provided for it, maybe this trilogy could have pulled itself together by Episode IX. As it is, it didn’t, and all we got was the big question of what might have been instead.

Thanks for reading! If you’re enjoying my blog and would like to support my writing, you can use the button below to visit my Buy Me A Coffee page.