10 Years Later, The Force Awakens Remains Misunderstood

Ten years ago, Star Wars still felt like magic. Some people remember where they were for the Moon landing; I remember where I was when the first teaser for The Force Awakens launched online (at an old girlfriend’s house after Black Friday brunch). Every frame was scrutinized: the cross-guarded saber, X-Wings roaring planetside, BB-8’s anxious roll. The plot, shrouded in another J.J. Abrams mystery, was teased in marketing and merch, where posters and action figures of Kylo Ren doubled as conduits of hype and intrigue. Everything was sacred.

These were the early days of Disney’s acquisition of Lucasfilm, and the sense of anticipation was running high. J.J. Abrams, the restarter of fading franchises, and co-writer Lawrence Kasdan, royal alumnus of Star Wars and Indiana Jones, had a task that required more resolve than lifting an X-Wing out of a Dogobagh swamp. They had to make a Star Wars movie 10 years after George Lucas completed the prequel trilogy, without Lucas’ involvement, and it had to be good. There have been many criticisms lobbed at The Force Awakens since its release, many fair. But it nailed making Star Wars feel truly mythic again.

Every introduction in The Force Awakens was important. Every scene was a discovery. There was a feeling of awe when the camera whip-panned to a grounded Millennium Falcon after Daisy Ridley’s Rey shouted, “The garbage will do.” I got goosebumps when Rey was handed Luke’s old blue lightsaber, whose story was “a tale for another time.” And like so many in the theater with me, I was overcome with childhood emotion at seeing Han and Chewie on the big screen again.

My sense of excitement extended to what’s often overlooked in The Force Awakens: what it does that’s new. There were fresh Force abilities, like Kylo Ren’s ability to stop a blaster bolt mid-air and raid the minds of his captives. There was a modest aesthetic shift, too. Although not as inventive as Doug Chiang’s production design on The Phantom Menace, there is a tasteful medieval look at play. Captain Phasma is a knight in shining armor, Maz’s castle is in a green countryside, and Rey and Kylo Ren’s forest scenes have a fairytale romance quality, a young woman meeting a dark prince. The final sword-in-the-stone moment, as Rey and Kylo Ren compete to summon Luke’s saber with a force-pull, is decidedly Arthurian.

More boldly, Abrams and Kasdan set up a sequel trilogy built on pain, loss, and ennui. The Force Awakens has been accused of being nothing more than a hollow remix of A New Hope and Return of the Jedi, a choice Abrams defended by saying Star Wars had to go backwards to go forwards. That undersells how big his creative saber-swings really were. From the opening crawl, we know our heroes failed. Luke Skywalker has vanished, a coward fleeing to a hiding place in the stars. Han Solo is a shell of his former self, returning to his smuggler ways after being a bad father and abandoning his wife. If these reveals feel disappointing, that’s because they’re meant to.

Nearly every character is plagued by the burden of history, revealing a screenplay more thoughtful about the weight of nostalgia than it’s been given credit for. We might see the familiar flash of X-Wings and an ugly, planet-sized superweapon, but the more the characters try to recapture the events of the original trilogy, the more trapped in the retrospective stasis of the dark side they become. The weight of expectation we projected onto the sequel trilogy is the same weight that haunts Kylo Ren, who worships Darth Vader’s melted helmet like an infernal tabernacle that hides the power of the past. When Rey calls him out for fearing he’ll never be as powerful as Darth Vader, it’s an acknowledgement of the burden of legacy that’s as true of Kylo Ren as it is of these films.

As Rey and Finn search for new identities, our new heroes are more existential protagonists than the old. Luke always wanted to run towards danger, but Rey clung to her Jakku home, believing she had no place in the fight. Meanwhile, Finn acts as a meta-character who keeps trying to inhabit various archetypes — warrior, Jedi, lover — while discovering none quite fit, an innovation damaged by the unfocused direction his character was taken in subsequent films.

Over the years, Star Wars has forgotten that most of these nostalgic cues were grounded in character. Maz presenting Luke’s saber wasn’t about dangling a familiar totem to excite us; it was to scare Rey into rejecting her call of adventure, an arc then brought full circle when she pulled the saber back to her. When Rey ran across the Falcon, it was an act of Dickensian coincidence that brought her to Han Solo and her destiny. Or maybe, as is hinted in the title, there was an awakening. Unlike Luke’s quest for power, Rey’s story was rooted in self-esteem and belonging, connecting Han, Luke, and Leia to her emotional journey. They weren’t vacuous cameos; they were the found family she needed.

The Force Awakens was lambasted for being risk-averse, to the point that George Lucas drolly side-eyed the film by saying, “the fans are going to love it. It’s exactly the movie they’ve been hoping for.” But despite exceptions like Andor and the recently cancelled The Acolyte, Disney’s uninspired Star Wars output has ironically made The Force Awakens one of its riskiest entries.

A decade on, shows by Dave Filoni and Jon Favreau shamelessly bait nostalgia, and the key image from the trailers for The Mandalorian and Grogu, the first Star Wars movie in six and a half years, is of an all too familiar AT-AT. The Force Awakens has gotten a lot of deserved heat, and The Rise of Skywalker didn’t help, but it’s a little bit like the Falcon: 10 years later, it’s still got it where it counts.