The part of the review attributing “Greatest Generation resentment” feels needlessly condescending, and also at odds with the intentions of this film and the Star Wars series. TFA certainly has a lot of excessive nostalgia, and it’s more accurate to say that this is the reason why the OT trio regresses so much (\"Han the statesman? Boring! Gimme more Han the smuggler!”) rather than any jealous attempt to tear them down. What’s more, Star Wars has always been a series pointing at kids and telling “You can do anything!” So it seems misplaced to claim the series should’ve had the presumption that one generation’s achievements could never be surpassed. Certainly new challenges would be more creative (though real life has really been trying its hardest to bring about a Fourth Reich…), so it would be better for the review to spend more time on what the new generation deserves.
I find the claim that this film was designed to disgrace the Greatest Generation is a little bit of a stretch, to put it mildly. The fact that a story has been retconned so that the successes of the heroes is invalidated by the sequel does not make it a slur on any historical events it was inspired by - for the simple fact that it\'s happened so many bloody times we have a trope for it: the Happy Ending Override.
And anyway, this happened so many times in the novels and comics of the old expanded universe - supported wholeheartedly by George Lucas incidentally - that these sequel films are blatantly copying them.
Basically, the trouble with your reasoning is that it\'s based on a flawed premise: you presume that there\'s some kind of sinisterly mediocre individual or individuals at work behind this film, in much the same way that certain reviewers believe that the sequel movies were designed to support an agenda by individuals with political philosophies in mind. In reality, it\'s all based on a largely thoughtless process at work in Disney - a nonsapient blueprint for making money.
Original trilogy = $ + make copy of original trilogy = $$$$$$.
That\'s it.
Leave a Comment:
The Kirkland Signature Star Wars film
I’ve spent the past eight years sanding down the reasoning for why I dislike The Force Awakens, and even then, I feel like whatever I write would grow in the telling and fill volumes that I’m not entitled to fill. As a preamble, let me first say that I deeply regret how much I criticized the Prequel Era – not because that stuff was necessarily good material, but because The Force Awakens took the wrong lessons from the backlash and comes off, as a result, as inherently reactionary. The solution to Star Wars’s woes wasn’t to remake A New Hope. It was to make a good film, and yes, these two options are mutually exclusive.
Those just smart enough to be dangerous, plunging headfirst into the Dunning-Krueger Effect with their thin patina of historical understanding, will tell you with smug self-satisfaction that history is cyclical – every republic is the Roman Republic, every autocrat is Augustus Caesar, every expansionist right-wing state is the Third Reich. That’s the basic premise of this film – that, in effect, the restoration of a democratic republic had no effect, that thirty years on, the same empire will fight the same resistance movement. They even have similar design philosophies. Did no one in the First Order that wearing sheet-white armor in a forest was stupid? Did no one among the Republic-that-was develop a superior design to the X-Wing? Nope, because corporate says you need iconic designs, logic be damned. History isn’t a sandbox for factions to play empire vs. rebels or Axis vs. Allies. The scene where Poe shows the difference between Starkiller Base and the first Death Star – one is bigger, that's it – is a perfect metaphor for this excrementitious philosophy. A larger imitation is still just an imitation. All the new technology and the bigger budget, and what Disney/Lucasfilm created is artistically hollow.
Perhaps it’s the fundamental conceit of our generation that we can’t tolerate the fact that our antecedents might actually be better than we are, so we can’t have Luke, Leia, and Han be depicted as building successful lives in the world they helped create. We have to tear down their legacies and depict each of them dying in tragedy and failure, rather than triumph, for the next generation to do something meaningful. Calling the generation that defeated Hitler “the Greatest Generation” no doubt infused all who followed them with an inferiority complex – if they’re the greatest, we must all be lesser. And, to be honest, defeating one of the evilest states to ever exist should put you in consideration for being great, warts and all. The truth is, though, times change and no one’s going to pulling another Third Reich out of their hat for us to slay – thank God – so that opportunity will never come again. But that doesn’t mean we have to wallow in mediocrity. Each generation has its own challenges, but they are different ones that the ones from before. That could have been fertile ground for a more interesting story, instead of a retread.
I suppose there are other aspects of the film – the cinematography, the acting, and so on – but I find myself disinterested in them. What’s the point? They’re trying to cast everything in the mold of a superior film, which I can watch instead.