In Which The Small Ones Have Triumphed Over The Large

Completely Lost Out There

by DICK CHENEY

Star Wars: The Force Awakens
dir. J.J. Abrams
136 minutes

Let's reenact Star Wars. We will have the same scenes, only with different characters. The best moments from Return of the Jedi and The Empire Strikes Back will surely occur. Instead of calling it the Death Star, we will name it Starkiller Base. Get it? It will murder stars, along with common sense.

The man from Lost wishes he had a grandmother, too.

Let's reenact Lost. We will just siphon the best moments from the show into one, hour-long episode. Remember the hatch? I always wondered what was in there, along with what happened to Han Solo after he met his wife and fathered children. In both cases it turned out, nothing too great.

Someone had the idea to just remake Star Wars, only this time with a woman. She could have her own droid, one more spherical in form. The woman's name is Rey (Daisy Ridley), and she requires no help from anyone to do anything. She reminds us that women are fully capable of portraying Luke Skywalker. I mean, it was not that difficult a role.

The special effects were somehow more impressive in The Phantom Menace

Once she leaves her home planet of Jakku, she has an intense flashback when she touches a lightsaber. The air reeks of warm earth and goldenrod, but also of something foul, fetid water perhaps. It is really just a sexual awakening, except there was never any actual sex in Star Wars, since if George Lucas was having sex, he would have never bothered with the franchise to begin with.

She touches the lightsaber/penis and considers a lot of things. She thinks about how it turned out every single person from Lost was dead or something. I mean, there was a light in a cave. That was the secret of Lost. The secret of Star Wars, according to J.J. Abrams, is that once J.J. kills off every human being of larger than medium size, the world will just be ruled by Tom Cruise-esque short pants.

Guys, Randy Newman has a song for you.

Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac) is almost the hero of The Force Awakens, until he steps out of a T-70 X-wing fighter Black One and stumbles forward with his weird little walk, looking roughly as large as his droid. Isaac looks like a freaking tootsie roll. His chief virtue is that he does not look any taller than the male lead, a former stormtrooper named Finn (John Boyega).

No one who is kind is any taller than 5'7" in a galaxy far, far away. George Lucas ascended to a towering 5'6", Mr. Abrams is one inch taller. Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher) is 86 years young. Why did I watch this movie if I knew I would hate it? Fair question, and after cuddling with my wife Lynne for over an hour, I thought of an answer.

I would have found it more believable if she ran a small bookshop on Jakku.

I guess I thought this comeback would be not only exciting, but contain something new. Instead we have the bare elements of what is an extensive reenactment of the original trilogy. A man confronts his father on the exact same piece of machinery that we saw in The Empire Strikes Back. Aliens have a good time in a bar. Just as in the original Star Wars, some tiny weak point in a larger ship explodes the whole. This is not science fiction, since there is no science at all in this; it is fantasy, but it is not even very inventive fantasy.

Adaline Bowman was 187 years old.

The movie is extremely dull until the entrance of Han Solo (Harrison Ford). Ford is not the only comic relief this time around, but he is a loving, gruff individual that still had a lot of potential as a character before Abrams so pointlessly removes him from events. Han Solo does not last long in The Force Awakens, which is very discouraging because he was the only effective protagonist Lucas ever came up with that wasn't a metal robot.

Ford received a nice payout plus .5 percent of the film's gross to return to this miasma. He does all his lines from the original films, like he is at a very high class Star Wars convention. The entirety of The Force Awakens is fan service. Some of it was necessary in order to familiarize a new audience with the characters, old and new, that make up this universe. But it goes way beyond that. It is like reading fanfiction that ticks every possible box.

No one in the vicinity is the slightest bit alarmed, since stormtroopers are known for their stealth drives.

In one sense, it was this teeny hack director's job to make a crowd-pleaser, and Abrams seems to have done that. I don't want to deny that many people seem to be enjoying The Force Awakens; then again a lot of people are made happy by the sight of fireworks, which are basically just shining lights in the sky.

So if you look funny, you can't own a droid. How did she even know this droid wasn't this guy's lawful property? Since around 30 years seems to have passed since we last witnessed the trials of the Skywalker family, you would think that something would have altered during all that time. Consider how much in our world culture has been altered over a similar span. Part of the fun of returning to this universe was to see new outfits for stormtroopers, a variety of half-cotton, half-polyester costumes for the Resistance and to let us take stock of how technology has evolved during this period.

Instead, nothing at all has changed, which is the most disappointing aspect of The Force Awakens. Even George Lucas, as dumb as he is, made sure to make his prequels look and feel different from the original trilogy. In The Force Awakens, the costumes and effects are all relatively standard. There is not a single new thing included here: even the biomes (desert, jungle, and glacier) are all exactly the same.

Mini-Vader could have used a new color scheme; maybe something in magenta and gold?

The most disappointing part of this tragic, two hour-plus remake is the new gear of the main villain, Kylo Ren (Adam Driver). The moment where he takes his mask off is quite a despondent one. I question why he ever needed a mask in the first place, as the U.S. military veteran has always displayed an extremely expressive countenance. Despite the overly familiar voice modulation, Driver's charisma ensures that his scenes are the highlight of The Force Awakens.

She towered over John Boyega.

I understand that focusing on what people enjoyed about the original property is the key to any decent remake. But many of the things people enjoyed about Star Wars were innovative for the time period in which they appeared. All that is gone in The Force Awakens — there are no cutting edge visuals, no impressive planetary sets to astound us. There is just the cast of Hamlet, without any of the actual drama in the original.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording.

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In Which We Fought In A War

The Jedi of Minsk

by ALEX CARNEVALE

Some parts of the culture stay parts of the culture. Usually they relate to cultural icons, whose identities are so frequently personified in the art and Sovietesque reproduction of the image that it becomes currency in every aspect of the society.

Star Wars, on the other hand, is probably destined to inevitably disappear.

Mission-based programming like Star Trek and Stargate is about the vagaries of human exploration. That's not Star Wars. It's about fear of technology, and a movie about fear of technology is probably not going to age all that well in the age of technology. That's the age we're in.

Luke Skywalker is a poor boy on a distant planet. He is the main character in a fantasy. He is orphaned and this is not his real home world. We're going to hyperdrive said Han Solo, as if that were an actual thing. The problem is that you can't actually go faster than the speed of light.

This did not enter in George Lucas' thinking. As we found out during the execrable last three prequels in this vein, Lucas framed his investigations of interstellar incest into somewhat action packed rehashings of various SF clichés.

When Lucas was fourteen, he found out he couldn't bang his hot cousin, and what a terrific phenomenon resulted from that reproductive urge! I can give George all the credit in the world: this was a fantastic leap for the time, and even though his special effects look retarded now, they were one hell of step for mankind. (I particularly hate his robots.)

Dominion over the Galaxy, even in the long long ago, isn't really possible. You would need technological advances that likely can't exist based on our conceptions of physics. We may find out how to travel to other galaxies, but it will not be by slipping through space time. It will likely involve some changed conception of what being human is, or an AI that will work for us.

Instead George imagined the mindless Federation, first of all interstellar authorities, as least as kids in Wisconsin knew it. They weren't exactly getting the latest Robert Silverberg yarn mailed to their doorstep — they had to work for Wookies.

So George was their man, and you know the story. But really Star Wars isn't science fiction. There's little to no science in it. It's straight Shakespearean with a little Bible thrown in for Midwest America. It's a masterpiece of programming, and his casting was fabulous. Also give him credit for realizing that better directors could do the series a service. The Empire Strikes Back is one of the most mysterious fantasies ever created.

Many had imagined the possiblities of an ice planet, most notable Ursula K. LeGuin in her novel The Left Hand of Darkness. But these were irrecoverable moments and they were plotted quite nicely. I mean people were watching All in the Family on TV. Sorry I'm not a Norman Lear guy. I prefer interplanetary incest.

Speaking of which, this film aged its two protagonists quite gainfully, and even Natalie Portman, in her late devotion to the one known as Devendra, has suffered some from the Star Wars curse. Star Trek didn't do anyone's careers a favor, practically ruining Patrick Stewart's efforts to act in the next decade. Harrison Ford somehow jumped free of this damnable spell. Mark Hamill and Daniel Radcliffe may have to sauna together in the next fortnight or so.

Some people think George Lucas is a dick, others think his beard was "all right looking." It's somewhat unfortunate that he became such a megalomaniac, because if it had actually had to work for it we could have seen at least 14 feature films about space porn made to fund his divorces. Royalties forever limit the possibility of divorce.

Also, the end of Star Wars didn't really make rational sense, as about 5,000 parodies have taken the pains to point out. Seth McFarlane's was the best, with another pilot calling Luke out for being a dick once the rebellion got going.

Lucas also was brilliant at settings. He did really well with the abscence of nature — desert, forest — and he even made a great dense jungle. He also knows how not to fuck up a spaceport.

Later on, the message became more preachy. Whatever government Lucas' Intergalatic Senate satirized, I'm not that interested in learning about it between picnic lunches featuring Natalie Portman and Hayden Christiansen. The latter was absolutely horrible, and he also ruined Jumper.

It's easy to make fun of Star Wars, and it's probably been parodied more than anything else ever, but it's also sort of difficult to imitate. It's a family drama with a fairly simple origin story and deep dark Federation.

The Jedi are the magicians, but the whole thing doesn't really make sense. In real life the Jedi would be tortured and killed for being terrorists. Things were a lot more lax in Star Wars for the Jedi.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He tumbls here.

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