Star Wars

If you haven't seen the movie and don't want to see spoilers, leave now.

So I saw Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Not just saw it, but made an event of it and saw it at my local IMAX theater.



Let me be clear right now. I did not hate the movie. There were some very enjoyable bits in it. But was I disappointed? Hell, yes.

Before I get into the whys and wherefores, let me clarify what my hopes and expectations were for the movie.

I saw the original Star Wars in August of 1977. Even with the buzz the movie was already generating, how good it was came as a surprise. A wonderful, exciting, well-crafted story, it caught fire. Okay, so maybe the wonder that comes with the initial discovery of something that good was too much to ask. I'd have settle for the excitement that came with Return of the Jedi and The Empire Strikes Back. After all, by then we all had "expectations." Those movies didn't disappoint. In fact, when Darth Vader said, "Luke, I am your father," the audience collectively gasped. Star Wars wasn't a newly discovered gem when we saw that scene, but it still managed to surprise us.

And that was what was missing from this new According to Hoyle movie. Not only were there no surprises, but it quickly became predictable. Yes, it's still better than The Phantom Menace but, for me, only as a nostalgia piece.

The movie starts with a droid that has a secret map hidden inside it that must not fall into the hands of the Empire (now called The First Order). Deja vu anyone? But I was okay with that. I respected it as an homage. A tip of the head, if you will, to the original movie. Sadly, the head tipping never stopped. The Empire, oops, sorry, the First Order is hot on the tail of the young rebel pilot who has possession of the droid. A battle ensues and the pilot is captured by Darth, er, oops, I mean Kylo Ren, but not before our brave pilot sends the droid off to wander the sand dunes of the planet, so it won't be captured. The droid conveniently finds it ways into the company of Rey, a young woman who makes her living scavenging the wreckage of old, crashed space ships. But of course, the empire, sorry, the First Order is close behind and she and the droid steal a spaceship that just happens to be . . . Wait for it . . . The Millennium Falcon. Along the way, she's picked up a storm trooper who has deserted.

Do you see all the parallels? The Droid with secret plans falls into the hero's hands but escapes the Dark Forces aboard a "piece of junk" (Luke/Rae's words). The characters are different . . . and yet they're not.

The original Star Wars is loaded with archetypes. The same archetypes are present in The Force Awakens. They just have different names.

The hero = Luke = Rey
The villain = Darth Vadar/Luke & Leia's father = Kylo Ren/Leia & Han's son
The mentor role is split between Han Solo, whose death is reminiscent of Obi Wan Kenobi's and Luke who trained Kylo Ren before he turned to the dark side, mirroring Obi Wan's role in Darth Vader's life. At the movie's end, he's poised to take Yoda's place training Ren (who no one in the audience doubts will turn out to be his daughter. There will be no gasp of surprise when this is revealed in the next movie.)

And of course, there's the threat of annihilation provided in the original movie by the Death Star. In The Force Awakens that threat comes compliments of (dum, dum, dum) a bigger, badder Death Star. Because really . . . no originality is permitted in the franchise.

There are other small things that annoyed me. C3PO's appearance for instance which is totally gratuitous because he simply has no reason for being in the movie. An even bigger annoyance is that his voice is wrong. Not a lot. Just enough to nag at you. I know it was the same actor doing the voice, so maybe the problem was in the added effects, but IMHO, if you're going to include a character for pure nostalgic value, at least get him right.

And this may just be me, but did it seem as though Harrison Ford phoned in his performance? Don't get me wrong. He's proven he can act, and he got paid a shitload of money to reprise his role as Han, but he didn't seem to put any effort into this movie. Well, maybe a little in his death scene, but even that wasn't up to the standard I expect from him. I guess some actors improve with age. Others rest on their laurels.

The movie continues to homage its ass off with lines like "There's good in him. I know it." How many people have said this line now? Luke said it in The Return of the Jedi, and I think Obi Wan said it, and didn't Padme utter the same line in one of the prequels? Only now it comes out of Leia's mouth. One more thing that would have been a nice homage if there'd been more originality to the rest of the story.

All of this, I might be able to forgive. I can see the value of the movie as a nostalgia piece. I wouldn't call it episode VII (more like a remake of episode IV). But I can't forgive the plot holes. Every Jedi requires a teacher. Well, every Jedi but Rey. Five minutes after her first inkling that she can tap into the force, she's using the old "These are not the droids you're looking for" mind trick. And how does a desert rat become so proficient with a light saber (which is really just fighting with an illuminated sword) that she can hold her own against someone who has trained extensively with one?

So you may be surprised to know that I see some redeeming values in the movie. Specifically, the performances of Daisy Ridley as Rey and John Boyega as Finn, the storm trooper defector. They're both brilliant and give the movie its heart. Daisy Ridley especially blew me away but part of the reason is purely personal because Daisy Ridley could be my favorite niece's doppelganger. Right down to the faint freckles on her nose. It was really deja vu-ish watching Daisy on the screen while my niece sat on my right. I have no doubt it predisposed me to like Daisy/Ren, but I think I'd have liked her anyway because she was just that good.

The other thing I liked was that The Force Awakens did have moments of the humor that's so big a part of the original franchise. It doesn't take itself too seriously--though I wish it had taken itself seriously enough to be more original.

What did y'all think of the movie?

But the Book is Better . . . Or is it?

The Hunger Games and John Carter are just the latest to prove that books are a profitable source for movie material. The practice goes back a long way but many believe that the book is always better. I thought I'd look at that bit of folk wisdom to see if it's true.




Die Hard AKA Nothing Lasts Forever by Roderick Thorp - This is a case where the movie was a definite improvement on the book. McLane's wife doesn't even appear in the book. Instead, that spot is filled by McLane's bratty grown daughter. In the scene where McLane saves Holly from falling at the end of the movie, he fails to save his daughter, so you don't even get the possibility of a happy ending, but given how bratty the daughter was... okay, so maybe that was the happy ending.





P.S. I Love You - There are differences between the book and the movie but the simple truth is I love both of them for mostly different reasons. The book is set 100% in Ireland (Cecelia Ahern is the daughter of the former Prime Minsiter of Ireland), but the movie changes the heroine to an American. Since I saw the movie first, this didn't bother me, but it does rather smack of pandering to the US audience. Still both are excellent.






Shining Through - This seems to be a sleeper movie, but I love a good spy story, and I loved this. The book? Not so much. If I remember correctly (and it's been quite a while), the "hero" of the book is married, so the heroine is sleeping with a married man. That completely put me off (yes, deep in my little black heart lurks the ghost of a puritan) but even had that not been the case, I just didn't enjoy the book. If I'd read the book first, no way would I have bothered with the movie.





The Lord of the Rings is a book many people hold almost sacred. Far be it for me to argue with that. I first tried to read it when I was 13 or 14. As much as I loved fantasy, I thought it moved too slow. (I was an avid Andre Norton fan and her books MOVE.) There have been a number of attempts at making this into a movie, but those never grabbed me either. Not until the technology to do it right came along and met Peter Jackson. I love the movies. Still can't get through the books though.





I was in high school when I first saw Gone with the Wind. I thought Scarlett was a spoiled brat. As far as I was concerned, I never needed to see it again. So I can't say what made me think reading the book a decade or so later was a good idea. Scarlett is just as spoiled in the book, and yet . . . Something in Margaret Mitchell's writing makes Scarlett sympathetic. I could see that this young woman, who had been raised to never be more than a spoiled southern belle, had a streak of steel in her that made her able to do whatever she had to to save herself and her family. Wrong-headed as she often was, still spoiled enough to take the easy way when she could, stubborn enough to never back down from the unpleasant decisions that were necessary for her survival, in Mitchell's book, Scarlett is someone to be admired for overcoming her upbringing and surviving in a world she could never have imagined before the war. Mitchell deserves the kudos she received for this story.



Please share your favorite comparisons (good and bad).

Mirroring Heroes and Villains; Will it Work for You?

The best villains are mirror images of the hero. There but for the grace of God, go I.  That’s one of the pieces of story wisdom that you see time and again. But is it true? Lots of excellent stories don’t  practice it. Lots of stories don’t even have villains. Where is the villain in stories that pit the hero against nature?

Remember M. Night Shyamalan’s movie Unbreakable? Maybe not. It didn’t do nearly as well as The Sixth Sense. 


The premise revolved around two men, one of whom (Bruce Willis’ character) was invulnerable, literally the sole survivor of a nasty train wreck. The other (Samuel L. Jackson's character) a man whose bones broke if he blinked wrong. Hero and villain, set up as mirror images of each other. The villain even says as much near the end. But it obviously didn’t work because the movie basically bombed. The question is why? I think it had to do with choices. Bruce’s character was wishy-washy about his abilities in the beginning. When he takes on a superhero persona, he does so reluctantly and only to be a hero in his son’s eyes. I don’t think that’s a strong enough reason. The villain seems to choose villainy for even weaker reasons. And at the core, neither of them chose to be invulnerable or fragile. That was a genetic crapshoot. So nothing here resonated.

Does that negate the mirror theory?

Or does execution make a difference?

Remember Raiders of the Lost Ark? Indy and the French archeologist Belloq? This is another one where the villain points out that there’s not much difference between himself and the hero, and Indy snarls at him for daring to say such a thing. Except Belloq really isn’t the big villain in the story. He’s more of a convenience for getting the characters into the position the screenwriter needed them to be in. The villains are the Nazis. I can’t really get behind making a case that the Nazis mirror anything about Indy.

So another place where the wisdom bombs.

Let’s try again.

One has to ask why Darth Vader is such an enduring villain because through most of the Star Wars trilogy, he’s pretty one dimensional. Okay, yes, there’s something terrifying on a primal level about that constant asthmatic breathing. That’s the kind of thing that can haunt your nightmares without even needing to see who’s stalking you. But character-wise, he’s an obstacle, a personification of the Empire, until the big reveal that he’s Luke’s father. Then he gets interesting. There’s a touch of that mirroring thing here. Will Luke become his father? And that’s interesting because it’s based on choices. Vader’s as well as Luke’s. 


There’s a lot we learn in the prequels that mark differences between the two, but we didn’t know all that when it was just the original trilogy, so I feel justified in ignoring it. The original movies are where Vader earned the status of immortal villain, and there’s mirroring in those. So yes, mirroring the hero and villain can be effective when it’s done well.

In the movie Crimson Tide, Gene Hackman’s character plays an old-school submarine commander who believes his primary duty is to follow orders. Denzel Washington, his XO, is less rigid. When they receive orders to launch a preemptive nuclear strike against Russia which is then followed by a secondary transmission that is cut off, Hackman intends to follow his last standing order. Washington believes they must wait to get the order verified because the lost transmission could have rescinded the previous order (an excellent example of high stakes if ever I saw one.) The conflict between these two becomes the crux of the story. On a basic level, the two men mirror each other. Old school vs. new school. Follow the orders given or take the initiative to question?


Because audiences demand a winner and a loser, the story resolution gives us one, and Washington’s position is validated, although at the end of the movie, the military board determines that they were both right. And it would have been easy to write an alternate ending that validated the commander’s position, which also makes this movie an interesting example of the principle that the most interesting conflicts are good vs. good--but that’s another post. Although it provokes the thought that mirroring might be most effective in good vs. good conflicts. Hm. A thought worth exploring. But again, that’s another post. The point of this post is whether mirroring is a valid story tool, and this example clearly shows that it adds layers of depth that would be hard to achieve without it.

In fact, mirroring works even when you’re not talking about villains and heroes. P.S. I Love You doesn’t have a villain per se. Holly’s journey back to living after the devastating loss of her husband is the main story line. The mirroring between Holly and her mother, whose husband walked out and never came back when Holly was fourteen, is an important part of the story. Her father’s desertion makes Holly’s loss more poignant because on an emotional level the loss of father and husband mirror each other, but even more important to the story is the mirroring of Holly and her mother. Though the mirroring between the two is there through most of the movie, the screenwriter states it plainly when Holly’s mother says that the worst feeling a mother can have is watching her daughter head for the exact same life the mother led and feeling helpless to stop it. 

Wow.

Powerful stuff that mirroring.

Do you use mirroring in your stories? If so, are you aware when you do?