Star Wars: The Force Awakens: The Spoiler-Free Version

Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens is the GoldenEye of Star Wars films. It hits a lot of familiar beats, but it does this in the name of dragging the franchise out of the shadow of recent failures and reigniting it for easy public consumption. There are a lot of spoilery nitpicky problems with it, starting with the fact that I can't decide whether Adam Driver was horribly miscast or the best casting decision in the film, but that's for the VERY SPOILER HEAVY post.

Oh, and speaking of Bond/Star Wars comparisons, Daniel Craig has a hilarious cameo in it.

All right, on to as much substance as I can give you without giving any major plot points away. I love the fact that, right after the title crawl, the camera pans down to a Star Destroyer. None of this ships-that-aren't-Star-Destroyers nonsense that we had to suffer through in the prequels.

Anyway, The Force Awakens does a good job churning out the exposition - such as it relates to our heroes, at any rate. There's a Republic, a Resistance, and a New Order, and it's not completely clear what the relationship is between the Republic and the Resistance, or why the Republic can't fight the New Order directly. Nor is it made abundantly clear what the New Order wants to do beyond Smash The Rebels. Its leader, Snoke, does seem to have more of a Dark Side Jihad in mind than Palpatine ever did; one got the sense that Palpatine treated the Dark Side as a tool, a means to an end (which cheapens the existential threat of the Dark Side, as I'll explain in the spoiler post). He never came off the way Snoke does here, as the High Priest of Evil.

Anyway, Snoke has two minions, Kylo Ren, a fallen Jedi (note that, to the best of my recollection, he's never called a Sith) and Vader wannabe, and General Hux, a military officer and Tarkin wannabe. Kylo Ren's character can't really be explored outside of the spoiler-heavy post, but Hux seems to exist to chew scenery and otherwise be Recurring Imperial Guy, because we have to have one of those (see, e.g., Admiral Piett in Empire). They're after a robot, who is hiding out on a desert. Sound familiar?

Our heroes this time are a rather unlikely band: a stormtrooper who defects as early as possible and a scavenger who doesn't want to leave home. But they play off each other (and Han Solo, and Oscar Isaac's somewhat-underused-but-used-as-much-as-they-could-without-gracelessly-shoehorning-him-into-the-plot-3P0-in-the-prequels-style hotshot pilot) so well. By the half hour mark you know for sure that JJ Abrams has learned from the single most glaring flaw in the prequels/toy ads: you've got to have actual characters.

The plot is an amusing string of coincidences that just barely hang together (the surface of Jakku is apparently small enough for BB-8, Finn, and Rey to find each other quickly, the Falcon just happens to be where the heroes can get at it when they need to make a quick escape, every dive in the galaxy has New Order and Resistance agents who can call in their respective armies but only after the latest round of exposition is over, etc.)

The real reason this film works is because JJ Abrams did something very, very similar to what he did on Star Trek - namely, he came up with a few character archetypes, put them in a rollicking popcorn adventure with lots of humor, and stapled the whole thing together by giving one returning cast member an important role. The rails come off during the last half hour or so, when he's suddenly reminded that he needs to wrap the film up with a lightsaber fight (because that's how Star Wars films end) that needs to be "personal" (because the non-personal dance-fights of the prequels sucked), but other than that the film is excellent.

Well, mostly.

The real question, of course, is not "Is The Force Awakens better than The Phantom Menace?" but rather "Is The Force Awakens better than Heir to the Empire?"  And the answer to that later question is, well, no.

If you're wondering what Heir to the Empire is, by the way, drop what you're doing and go read it. Your eyes were meant for a work of art like that, not crappy internet reviews like this. It's awesome and fun and rollicking and it's got the introduction of Mara Jade, unarguably the second-greatest sci-fi lit heroine ever (after Honor Harrington, of course). And, of course, it has Thrawn, who is basically Evil Alien Strategist Sherlock Holmes. Which is awesome.

You see, a story is only as good as its villain, and while Heir to the Empire has the greatest Star Wars villain ever, The Force Awakens has what might be an intentionally pathetic Sith wannabe. Interesting choice. More on that in the spoiler post. Suffice it to say that The Force Awakens is the third-best Star Wars film ever made, and it could have been a whole lot better had the villains been better.