I have seen Star Wars – and so have you

You have seen the new Star Wars, you have. You just might not know it. Star Wars: The Force Awakens is a remake of the original film with Rey (Daisy Ridley) as a new and less wet Luke (Mark Hamill) and that does not seem to bother many people. The film has made something like $1.5 billion in the last half an hour plus it has had superlative reviews. Only, do you know who else has seen Star Wars?

Rey.

The lead character in the new Star Wars film has seen Star Wars.

Remember that often parodied scene from the original when Obi-Wan Kenobi (Alec Guiness) controls a Stormtrooper’s mind? “These aren’t the droids you’re looking for.” Rey has seen it too because that is the only way that she could possibly know that you can do this and how to do it.

That’s too far for me, that is going too far. I adore Back to the Future part II which is literally the first film repeated but that’s done with the glorious chutzpah of going back in time and showing us the same scenes from a new perspective. Love it. Star Wars: the Force Awakens doesn’t have that wit.

It sets out to be a new episode in the series and initially has the occasional nod to the original. That’s risky: it’s hard to stay absorbed in the new story when you can’t help but nod at references you recognise. It might be worth the risk, to a point, as the needs you to know it’s part of the same world as the original but long before Rey gives us a movie review, the references overwhelm.

I remember watching JJ Abrams’s Star Trek Into Darkness and murmuring “cue Spock” just before he entered and delivered word for word the line I knew he would. With Star Wars: The Force Awakens, I clearly remember thinking “at least they’re not going to repeat the trench scen – oh. Bugger.”

I’m with you if you loathe George Lucas’s Star Wars prequels and I’m with you shuddering about Jar Jar Binks. But it’s a fine, fine line between the appallingly poor Jar Jar and the cultural icon Yoda: Jar Jar could’ve worked and at least Lucas was trying something new. The Force Awakens isn’t.

Even the new film’s seemingly big and genuinely good move of concentrating on a woman character isn’t truly new because it is done in the very oldest of ways. I just called Rey a woman because she is but every character in the film calls her a girl. More, every character is surprised when she can fly starships and when she can fight.

She’s never allowed to just be, to do what she does. If a scene is not a repeat of an original Star Wars one then its purpose is to show that the new creative team has cast a wom – sorry, girl – and that they’re great for doing so.

On my drive to the cinema, a car pulled in front of me with a bumper sticker saying “You’ve just been overtaken by a girl”. You’re not now thinking I should’ve called the police, a prepubescent underage child was driving, you’re thinking you know exactly what it meant. It meant that the driver was embodying girl power and that I, as a man driving behind, must be somehow threatened by this, must have my machismo thwarted.

I don’t have any machismo and I could not even fake giving a damn that this car was in front of me. But I have a lot of bile at the assumptions and the presumptions. In the same way, The Force Awakens assumes and presumes that I will be surprised a woman – sorry, girl – can fly, fight, breathe, be. So in the same way I am annoyed and affronted and insulted.

It’s just worse that I already knew the film so well from last time that it couldn’t keep my attention.

Star Wars is not a (Han) Solo effort

It’s not like you should rush to find writing advice in the scripts to Star Wars movies, but bear with me. I’ve written before about how drama is a collaboration – and that this is one of its joys – but I’ve never before thought of how it can change over time. Literally change over time: the drama you and everybody makes can be physically changed a little ways down the road.

I don’t know what to think about it. But I’m thinking about it a lot now because actor Harrison Ford responded to a famous example of it this week.

Follow. You hide your inner geek very well so I’m not certain you know this, but there’s a thing about Han Solo in the first Star Wars film. It’s the tiniest very big thing there is. George Lucas went back to Star Wars and changed a scene by about a pixel and it enrages some people, it makes others shrug. It’s to do with a scene where Han Solo is confronted by a baddie and in the original version, Solo shoots this guy. In the revised version, the guy shoots Han Solo. It’s not as big a difference as that sounds, we don’t suddenly lose Harrison Ford’s character, erased from the rest of the film, because this guy misses.

Yet that’s the thing for me. I think we do lose Harrison Ford’s character for the rest of the film.

The guy is named Greedo and when Ford began a Reddit Ask Me Anything interview, he was asked: who shot first, Han or Greedo? Harrison Ford’s reply:

I don’t know and I don’t care.

It’s a funny line and you can imagine the weariness in his voice. It’s almost enough to make me read the whole interview. (Have you tried, though? Reddit’s AMAs are impenetrable after the fact: the transcripts of these live interviews are stupidly hard to unpick. But go on, have a try with Ford’s here.)

The trouble is… it matters.

George Lucas wrote the first Star Wars film and George made these changes, Ford acted the scenes and had no part in the alterations. I’m not arguing that Lucas should leave his own films alone, I’m not arguing that Ford should get in a tizzy over changes to a thirty-year-old movie.

I am saying that this one small change is actually gigantic and that it was done after the collaborative heat of production. I tried watching Star Wars the other day while I was thinking about all this and I got a bit bored so perhaps I’m simply wrong. But I believe that had I got into the story, this scene would have taken me out of it again. It bothers me enormously that someone can make such a fundamental change and it makes my eyes go wide that anyone would want to. It actually makes me think that George Lucas genuinely does not understand storytelling.

Hmm.

Here’s the thing. When Han Solo shoots this alien fella dead, it tells us a lot. We’ve already seen a picture-perfect toothy farm boy hero in Luke Skywalker, this is telling us that Han Solo is very nearly an anti-hero. Let’s not get carried away. But he is out for himself and this is really his one character note throughout the first film. Fine.

When he doesn’t shoot first, when he waits for the baddie to shoot him, Han Solo is a hero. I’d say he’s as empty and unbelievable a figure as 1970s US TV hero, but he’s squarely a square-jawed hero type. We’ve already got one of those in Luke and the rest of Solo’s selfish actions and dialogue don’t square with the squarely square-jawed hero. With this one moment, he no longer fits.

More, this is meant to be a dangerous moment. Han Solo is cornered, we learn his enemies aren’t exactly legion but they are pretty big. (The sequel, The Empire Strikes Back is correctly thought of as the superior film – it’s all relative – but one of its clunkiest lines refers to how Solo is hunted. “A death mark’s not an easy thing to live with,” says a man just trying to get through the script.)

Everyone’s hunting Han Solo and this Greedo guy is the one who gets there first. He’s beaten all the rest. And shooting a laser pistol at a distance of three feet from his target, he misses.

That is a crap baddie.

That is a cardboard baddie.

So now Han Solo isn’t an anti-hero and his enemies are worthless.

Harrison Ford made certain decisions about his performance in 1976 or whenever this was filmed. George Lucas the director made certain decisions then. Lucas the script writer had made all the decisions earlier. Together they created the scene we see but Lucas alone could step back into it decades later and make a gigantic change.

The positive thing I take away from this is that moments matter. It’s scary to think that a tiny touch on the tiller of one scene can so radically change a character but it’s also exciting. Makes me press harder on scenes and moments as I write them.

But the bad thing I take away from this is that unless Lucas simply could not see the impact of his change, he elected to do it regardless. I think he decided Han Solo had to be a good guy. I think he chickened out.

Only, this is Star Wars. It’s just Star Wars. If you’re going to lose your nerve over a character, it should surely be over a better one.