1. The biggest complaint most people had about The Force Awakens is that it was too similar to A New Hope. The truth is, it wasn't similar enough. In fact, they were about entirely different things. It's an understandable mistake to make though, it was designed to fool you.
If the imitation in The Force Awakens is so obvious to you then don't you think it was obvious to J.J. Abrams as well? Do you think he just couldn't come up with an original story? The guy wrote Lost, whatever storytelling problems he might have "lack of originality" isn't one of them.
Knowing that the lack of originality is intentional is not the real secret however. The real secret is that the obviousness of the lack of originality was intentional. You were supposed to notice it. It was meant to be so obvious that you wouldn't realize just how different it is in all the ways that actually matter. You're given symbols of the original movie so you go, "Death Star, desert planet, secret plans, okay they're trying to do the original, got it." You think they're trying to do the original so you won't realize that they're trying to do something entirely different.
So what happens when we actually do compare them?
2. Although A New Hope had a lot of main characters, everyone would agree that Luke was the main main character, even more than in either of the sequels. Well, if Luke was the main character of the original, Rey is the main character of The Force Awakens, right? The parallels are obvious. An orphan, stuck on a desert planet, who at first resists the call of adventure, but then travels to the giant planet-destroying enemy base and helps destroy it.
Except–
Rey doesn't even know about the base until 2 hours into the movie; in fact it's unclear that she ever knows anything about it. Probably she just thought she was on a regular planet until it got blown up. In A New Hope we're told about the bad guy superweapon in the opening crawl. In The Force Awakens we don't even see it until an hour into the movie (I checked). This is not a minor difference, or a mere oversight. In ANH the Death Star looms over the entire plot, literally and figuratively. It is the cause of all the major plot points. In TFA it is an afterthought, both to the movie and to the characters. In ANH the all-important plans are about how to destroy the Death Star. In TFA the plans are about the location of Luke. The plan to destroy the evil superweapon is formulated in two minutes (in-universe) of “whoever” at an informal meeting throwing ideas around. The good guys don't seem to care that much about destroying it, and the bad guys don't seem to care that much about saving it, even though its destruction is, on paper, the climax of the film. “What should we do about the big evil weapon?” “How about we blow it up?” Good plan.
This might be a controversial opinion, but a story has to be about something. Not should be about something, has to be about something. You can try to write a story about nothing but then it's a story about being about nothing. It is debated in philosophy whether reality must be ultimately intelligible, but it is a fact that any creation of a human intellect must be intelligible. So if TFA isn't about the superweapon (and the fact that most people don't remember that it was called Starkiller Base proves that it wasn't. No one had to be reminded that the original was called the Death Star. No, nerds don't count) then what is TFA about? Well, it's about Rey. Understand this. It is not that Rey is the main character, it is that the movie is about her. A New Hope is about the Death Star; the heroes trying to destroy it, the villains trying to save it. Luke, Han, Leia, and Obi-Wan are the main characters trying to destroy it, Vader is the main character trying to defend it. The conflict in the original movies was always bigger than any of the characters. Remember, that was why in Return of the Jedi Luke turned himself in; not because he wanted to convince Vader to reform, but because he realized he was “endangering the mission.”
Never does Rey care about the plans themselves, unlike Luke who chooses to help Obi-Wan deliver them to the rebels. And that right there is the biggest difference between the two characters: Luke chooses to help the rebels. Rey is dragged along every step of the way. She explicitly does not want to leave her planet, she is forced off. Luke is ambivalent about leaving, but decides to go fight once his aunt and uncle are killed. And it is a choice; simply saying “there's nothing here for me now” did not mean he had to help Obi-Wan, whereas Tie-Fighters shooting at you can at best be described as “coercive.” Every step of the way Rey is being forced along. Every time it looks like she is in a position to return to her planet some new event arises that carries her to the next scene in the movie. Luke had multiple opportunities to turn back, first on Tatooine, then after escaping the Death Star, when Han explicitly invites him to leave with him.
3. Here's a question: what actually changes if Ray wasn't in the movie? A lot of things happen around her, but she doesn't actually do that much. I know, I know, “she does a lot!” you'll say. “She pilots the Falcon, and saves Finn from the tentacle monsters on the station, and fixes the Falcon, and hacks the doors, and beats Ren in a fight, etc etc.” Rey has the appearance of agency but not the reality of it. She doesn't have the power to do any of the things she chooses to do. When she does act it is not by her own power, but by the illusion of her own power. This is how things happen for Rey: there will suddenly appear some deadly problem, Rey will not be able to solve it, then she'll concentrate for a second and suddenly be able to. Everything she does is designed to give her the appearance of agency but not the reality of it. All the problems she solves are ones that only exist for her to solve them. The ship will suddenly break, but for no reason, and in just the way she happens to know how to fix. Meanwhile, she doesn't deliver the plans to the good guys, she doesn't help blow up the bad guy base, she beats the villain in a fight but the victory is completely pointless. And again, whatever problems she does fix are not fixed because of her own abilities.
Not convinced? What do we know about Rey? She's a homeless orphan on a nowhere planet surviving by selling trash. What can she do? Well, apparently she can expertly fly and fix spaceships, win gunfights with soldiers, win street fights with professional tough guys, beat trained people in a swordfight, hack computers, and keep her skin surprisingly healthy for someone living on a sun-scorched desert planet. “Well she's a scavenger, that's where she learned all about ships and stuff.” That might be believable if there weren't examples of real life people in her situation, i.e. homeless people, and I'm pretty sure being homeless taught approximately none of them how to fix cars. “Well maybe she—” Stop. This is how fiction works: if it doesn't happen during or is explained in the story then it didn't happen. This isn't a historical record, this is something that only exists on-screen. If Rey was taking night school classes in between working in Space-Somalia then they would have mentioned it.
4. Ever notice that Luke is kind of a screw-up in ANH? He has to be saved a lot. Like, a lot. He has to be saved from the Sand People, he has to be saved in the bar, he has to be saved when he's stuck in the hallway after breaking out Leia, he has to be saved when he is in the trash compactor, he has to be saved during the attack on the Death Star, he has to be saved when Darth Vader is about to shoot down his fighter. I don't mean situations where everyone is in the same kind of general danger, I mean situations where Luke specifically is in danger and he can't get out of it without help. Other than his piloting skills, he doesn't have that much going for him. I'm not saying he doesn't progress as a character, he does. But he fails a lot. This is of course not a bad thing. From a storytelling perspective it helps maintain tension, but it is also a good trait to have as a person. Failure is a sign of trying. To progress as a person means to expand past one's limitations, to become actually something rather than potentially anything. Failing means being pressed up against one's limitations. It means you are forced to acknowledge that there are certain things you are not, certain things that you cannot do, and that you will have to change yourself if you want to be able to do those things.
But Rey is never allowed to fail, and if you can't fail then you can't try. Reread that last sentence and take note of the order. The lesson is that since you're the main character, life will make you good at things. Don't bother doing things because that means you're not what the story is about. Actions are necessarily directed outwards; you act on things. If someone is acting then that means they are directing themselves towards something else. If you're doing things then you're acknowledging that the story isn't about you. But if the story is about you then you don't have to do anything, the story will do things for you. Instead of you reacting to reality, reality is reacting to you. That's what happened to Rey when she could magically fly ships, and to Finn when he magically betrayed the bad guys.
5. A side-note: at first I hoped the movie would reverse our expectations and actually make Finn the one who was sensitive to the Force. It would have explained why he was able to “make a choice” and decide to leave the bad guys when no other storm trooper could. The movie even makes a point of explicitly telling us that there had been no previous signs of trouble from him. If the movie had gone this way it would have actually been good writing. The other storm troopers never betrayed the First Order not because they had all chosen to follow it, but because they never had the choice. If you grow up and only know one system then you don't get the choice to rebel against that system. If the reality of his situation was revealed to Finn by the Force then he would be then free to make that choice. As it was however, it appears that he was simply chosen by the movie to be the one storm trooper that rebelled.
“That's not how the Force works!” Han exasperatedly exclaims when Finn suggests they use it to help them break into the base. By which he means, you can't use the force like that because you can't use it at all. Not Finn, not Rey, not anyone. You either have it or you don't, it's not something you can just “use” because that would imply that it was something that depended on your own will. You don't use the Force, it uses you.
It's worth noting however that the Force didn't always act this way. Somewhere between the original trilogy and TFA everyone decided that the way the Force worked was that it just mysteriously picks you. But if all someone had to go on was the original movies then they would have surmised that the Force was a skill, or perhaps a virtue; something trainable. Someone might have innate talent for it, but the difference between someone who can use the Force and someone who can't is that the person who can use it is the one who works at it. When Obi-Wan starts training Luke in the use of the Force he doesn't start by saying “Luke, you have a natural gift,” he just says “You must learn the ways of the Force, if you're to come with me to Alderaan.” It's treated as though anyone could learn to use it if they wanted to. It's a matter of choice, not destiny. Rey doesn't have to learn anything about the Force when she starts using it. She's just able to do it. Why? Because she's the main character. Not: she's the main character because she can use the Force; she can use the Force because she's the main character. This is why Luke has been retconned into being so important, because otherwise they'd have to acknowledge that the old movies weren't about Luke. No, he wasn't that important. Not so important that the entire focus of two different militaries would be on him. “He was that important in the original movies! Remember in The Empire Strikes Back? We were told Vader was 'obsessed' with finding him!” Yes, Vader was. The Empire cared about the Rebellion, and the Rebellion cared about the Empire. Luke had blown up the Death Star but Han was still the only one willing to risk going out and looking for him when Luke was freezing to death. How important does that sound? TFA, when it treats Luke as being all-important, is reflecting our the audience's idea of Luke as “what the movies were about,” not the actual focus of the movies.
6. Nothing about this is unique to TFA. It is the common theme of modern-day adventure stories, e.g. Kirk in the 2009 Star Trek film becoming the captain despite having done nothing to earn it, simply because he's Kirk (not coincidentally also a J.J. Abrams movie). It was almost inevitable that this would be the kind of story they told from the moment they decided on a female lead (that isn't a put-down of women by the way. It wasn't a woman who wrote the script). In the modern Star Wars you don't become a Luke Skywalker by doing kinds the things Luke did, instead you are chosen for the role.
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