Star Wars: The Force Awakens turns ten today, which is cause for reflection on how, despite being good, it was the beginning of the end.
These days, a new Star Wars project is just part of the normal blockbuster film cycle. But ten years ago, the release of The Force Awakens hit theaters with a promise: Star Wars is coming back, and right this time. What followed was a brand revival, a host of fandom discourse, breakout careers, a radical change in Hollywood, and a culture war. As for getting Star Wars “right?” We all know how that turned out. Now a decade removed, it’s basically impossible to divorce The Force Awakens from everything that follows it. At the same time, understanding the film itself and how it came to be is critical to explaining how a pretty good movie kind-of ruined everything.
Is The Force Awakens any good on its own?
Yes, on its own merits, The Force Awakens is pretty good. It absolutely cribs from the original Star Wars, but we’ll have more on that later. Even so, the film plays both the notes it borrows and new ones competently. Harrison Ford slips right back into Han Solo like a glove, to the point where he genuinely seems to be having fun with the energetic new cast. The technical polish is off the charts, especially in the quality of physical sets and visual effects. The early scene of Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) stopping a blaster bolt cold remains one of the best moments of the entire sequel trilogy. Cinematographer Dan Mindel, a frequent collaborator of director J.J. Abrams, avoids many of the common traits of their other projects, while maintaining visual consistency with previous Star Wars flicks.
The Force Awakens also wisely avoids what much of the franchise did post-Return of the Jedi: getting in its own way. The film doesn’t hesitate to explain where The First Order came from or why the New Republic is funneling resources to the Resistance. Ironically, the maligned “mystery box” structure J.J. Abrams often uses is the thing that keeps this movie moving at lightspeed. If anything, the movie rarely stops to breathe in a way that prevents viewers from thinking about everything being introduced – unless it’s something Abrams aggressively signals the audience must think about. As a result, the film stays engaging enough that a first-time viewer doesn’t really notice the similarities to A New Hope until after the credits roll.
What’s old is new, and still old.
That’s all by design. Production on The Force Awakens began the moment ink hit paper on the Disney/Lucasfilm deal, but getting any more ink proved difficult. Initially, George Lucas shared his own private notes for possible Star Wars sequels, only for those notes to scare Disney into leaving Lucas on read. The task of writing Episode VII came to Michael Arndt, fresh off of another years-later sequel in Toy Story 3. Some of Arndt’s work would make it into the film, as he is credited, but ultimately Abrams would write it himself before bringing in Lawrence Kasdan to help get it over the finish line. Fans celebrated this move due to Kasdan’s writing of The Empire Strikes Back. Speaking of Kasdan, the idea of leaving only bread crumbs for the next production (something now criticized as foolish by many) harkens back to the original trilogy.
In truth, fan enthusiasm drives nearly everything in The Force Awakens. From the moment Disney got its paws on the brand, the goal was to funnel the lucrative and illogically faithful group of toy enthusiasts the original trilogy raised into its larger contingent of Disney brand obsessives. More than anything else, this film needed to do what the prequels didn’t – give people classic Star Wars. Showing off physical sets and alien prosthetics, paying the original cast whatever they wanted, hiring Abrams. At the same time, he still had nerd cred, and the infamous “Chewie, we’re home” moment in the first trailer was all in service of telling Star Wars fans: You can go home again!
The day everything changed.
And it worked. The Force Awakens grossed over $2 billion worldwide and received heaps of praise from critics. But, the story doesn’t end here. In fact, the release and success of The Force Awakens is only the beginning. Other studios, which were still just getting a grip on cinematic universes following the MCU, began to realize that they could jumpstart that process with a similar structure. Even revivals that didn’t use all the same formulas, like the other 2015 franchise reboot, Jurassic World, would be bringing actors back to iconic roles by the time their sequels rolled out.
Playing on nostalgia in this way would continue to prove lucrative even as Star Wars itself tried for a time to pull away. The Force Awaken‘s December box office record was eventually broken by 2021’s Spider-Man: No Way Home – a film that follows up on not one, but two different adaptations of the character. Even this year, as audiences begin to show fatigue for franchises, James Gunn’s Superman couldn’t resist borrowing the iconic John Williams score of Richard Donner’s 1978 Superman.
Fandom Wars.
As for the fandom, their takeaway was that, even after a decade of rage, memes, and harassment (particularly of actors Jake Lloyd and Ahmed Best), a corporation would eventually want their cash. This created a faction of bad-faith actors in the fandom whose largest complaint was that The Force Awakens wasn’t more like A New Hope. When Finn’s (John Boyega) face was the first to appear and hold Anakin Skywalker’s lightsaber in the teaser trailer, the right-wing reactionary works (then emboldened by GamerGate) jumped into action, furious at the idea of a Black man as a lead.
Once the film came out and it had become clear that Rey (Daisy Ridley) was actually Luke’s analogue, to say nothing of the obvious connotations of Kylo Ren’s petulant behavior, a mass of spite and bile was formed. Over time, this mass infected even positive receptions of The Force Awakens and later spin-off films, until everything boiled over when Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi leaned into these new elements.
The legacy of The Force Awakens.
This last point is the real lasting legacy of The Force Awakens. Most discussions of the film are more about what it opened up: a culture of rage and the inevitable capitulation to it. The Force Awakens has inherited many criticisms that don’t really apply to it, but to Abrams’ emergency return to the franchise. Sure, there’s chemistry between Finn and Poe (Oscar Issac), but The Force Awakens only reversed Poe’s death on Jakku after Issac pushed to be in the film more. Shippers who picked up on that saw more than was there. And to the bad-faith crowd, for all the Mary Sue accusations towards Rey (as if they don’t apply to Master Skywalker), she spends much of The Force Awakens out of her depth.
If there’s anything The Force Awakens is guilty of, it’s threading a bunch of potential futures that its maker could not deliver on. Which is why, ultimately, The Force Awakens does earn some of the common critiques lobbed at modern Star Wars. It sets the precedent of comfort nostalgia that eventually took Star Wars from rhyming to repetition. The mystery boxes it presents have the chance to reveal something new about this universe, but because it also promises its crowd the restoration of their childhood, even the new attempts to break that repetition are met with fury. That extends to all the major studios that follow its lead, more willing to raise the dead than risk fan critique or conservative backlash. Despite being a fun romp and technically impressive a decade later, The Force Awakens is much more the beginning of the end than the start of something new.
Star Wars: The Force Awakens is now streaming on Disney+. Watch the trailer here.
Featured images © Lucasfilm Ltd./Disney. Read more articles by Travis Hymas here.
Travis Hymas is a freelance writer and self appointed Pokémon historian out of Salt Lake City, Utah. Known to be regularly obessive over pop culture topics, gaming discourse, and trading card games, he is a published critic featured on sites such as Uppercut and The Young Folks.
