Hopeful Signs for the “Star Wars” Do-Over
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If you are a “Star Wars” fan, how you spent the day after Thanksgiving says a lot about you. After watching the première of the teaser trailer for next December’s “Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” did you lose a few hours on message boards and social media, scrolling through debates about why the beam of the new lightsaber flickered the way it did, or parsing clues as to whether the desert planet in the clip was Tatooine or else some sandy relative? Or, after catching sight of the Millennium Falcon tracing its famed arc against the sky, did you muse for a moment about what it would feel like to be a kid seeing such things for the first time, and then go and make yourself a turkey sandwich?
The franchise has many kinds of fans. Among them are the completists: those who have not only seen the movies but read the novels, watched the animated spinoffs, played the video games, collected the action figures, and even tried their hands at writing some fan fiction. These are the people who might have been inclined to argue that a Storm Trooper could not be played by a black actor (John Boyega), because Storm Troopers are cloned descendants of a single human who had lighter skin. Or to rebut those arguments by pointing out that the Galactic Empire had also recruited new Storm Troopers from the general population, and so that argument was either motivated by ignorance or racism, or both. (Boyega, in a message on Instagram, told people fretting about the racial makeup of an imaginary, plastic-suited fighting force simply, “Get used to it.”)
On the other end of the fan spectrum are the people whose eyes glaze over at even these entry-level arcana, and who would prefer time, as it relates to “Star Wars,” at least, to have stopped in 1983, with “The Return of the Jedi,” the third film of the original trilogy. This would have spared the world George Lucas’s widely detested prequel trilogy as well as his intrusive C.G.I. tinkering with the older movies in the special editions, and instead would have left us basking in the cheerful song of the Ewoks as they celebrated the destruction of the Death Star. (Yub nub!) It is this group, those people who would describe themselves as fans of the original trilogy but that’s it—nerds but not nerds—that the new movie, directed by J. J. Abrams, seems especially aimed at satisfying.
The trailer, though just about ninety seconds long, is packed with nostalgic touchstones—a kind of greatest-hits collection that even people who stopped thinking about “Star Wars” years ago would recognize. First, and most important, there is “the ship that made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs,” the Millennium Falcon, whose appearance in the new movie was revealed this fall when photos of the film shoot leaked online. And there are shots of the Empire’s TIE fighters and the Rebels’ X-wings, both spiffed up a bit but retaining their basic designs and flight patterns. The characters’ costumes have the scruffy charm of the original movies, before George Lucas and his team of digital engineers decided to sterilize the “Star Wars” universe: Boyega’s Storm Trooper outfit has smudges; an X-wing pilot’s helmet looks as if it has seen better days. And, in an important sign that Abrams seems interested in making the movie be about people rather than gizmos, Boyega looks like a real person, and the sweat on his forehead looks like real sweat.
Beyond the visuals,the new trailer’s greatest nod to the past comes from its sound detail. Everyone could hear John Williams’s new-old score backing the action, but canny listeners made out the mechanized jabbering of an Imperial probe droid, like the one that discovered the location of the rebel base in “The Empire Strikes Back.” When the actress Daisy Ridley fires up her land speeder, the engine turns over in the same dirt-fouled way that the speeders did in the old days. The sounds of X-wings in flight and the engine of the Millennium Falcon kicking it up a gear are spot on and pleasantly familiar. The neon lasers shot from the guns of the TIE fighters are literally blasts from the past.
George Lucas, having created the “Star Wars” movies, committed the great sin in his prequels (“The Phantom Menace,” “Attack of the Clones,” and “Revenge of the Sith”) of not being much interested in re-creating the original trilogy. He gave up the spit-and-glue aesthetic of those films, whose clunky reminders of real-world physical realities were a key to their charm, in order to explore the early limits of digital filmmaking. Matters such as characterization or narrative (never mind acting) got lost along the way. It turned out that Lucas didn’t have much to say beyond the fact that he had new ways to say things. What resulted were technical marvels and boring, soulless movies. And then Lucas, perhaps chastised by the mass revolt against his new creations or else no longer interested in prolonging the space opera that built his career and maybe, in its way, derailed it, sold “Star Wars” to Disney, in 2012. Even in its low moments, “Star Wars” has been a cash cow, and Disney has promised not only a new trilogy but stand-alone spinoff movies as well. We’re about to get a lot of a galaxy far, far away—and whatever sanctity the franchise possessed in the eyes of its fans will ultimately get sequelled and prequelled out of us in the end.
But it hasn’t happened yet. In Abrams, Disney has chosen not only a director for its new movie but a dedicated librarian of a particular version of the franchise, a curator of the sights and sounds of his own childhood at the movies. (Abrams has performed something similar with his “Star Trek” reboots; here, he is attempting a rehabilitation, if not a resuscitation.) The teaser is less a preview of a movie than an assurance of Abrams’s bona fides as a fan, and his commitment to righting the wrongs of the prequels. By getting the details right, he has shown himself to be a trustworthy protector of the best parts of the original “Star Wars” movies. As to whether or not he has a new story to tell: wait til next year.