‘The Force Awakens’ Makes Star Wars Mystical Again

JJ Abrams was the right person to reboot Star Wars.

Despite being one long homage, The Force Awakens leaves enough unsaid to actually make the universe feel like something worth getting lost in again. While the poor, maligned prequels feel like a guy beating you in the face with a copy of Star Wars: The Complete Visual Dictionary—"Do you LIKE pedantic explanations of fictional technology? YEAH you do, you goddamn nerd"—The Force Awakens instead revels in the fact that the stakes at play are nothing less than the fate of the universe.

Abrams is uncommonly good at making actions feel real. This film is less about explosions and chase scenes and guns blazing, and more about individuals coming to grips with the consequences of that action, mortal or otherwise.

Abrams also doesn't let the audience relax: He's given the film a tense, claustrophobic feeling the lends the series a violence that's not existed previously in the franchise, inspired by the style of horror movies more than I could have expected. The Force Awakens is the first Star Wars movie in which I've felt dread. (This effect was likely heightened by seeing the movie in 3D, which was surprisingly well-planned; I also ate some sort of reggae pastry that was a lot more MORE than anticipated, which at the very least contributed to me saying "holy shit" a lot.)

People die in The Force Awakens, and they're killed with a visceral brutality that's not been seen in Star Wars before. Star Wars has always been a franchise that glosses over the fact its characters are indeed fighting a war. People get shot and fall down in Star Wars; they don't get murdered in front of a bloodstained character who's facing the horror of the violence he's been party to.

While "blood-covered character surrounded by death" is the stuff of rote action movies, which a Star Wars film should never be, the secret to The Force Awakens is that by making the granular experiences of individuals feel more honest than past films, the audience is given a solid foundation from which to explore the essential mysticism of Star Wars.

When working with a storyline that's a fairly basic heroic epic—good versus bad, the heroes are screwed, but then they succeed—it's crucial to show, not tell. The magic lies not in explaining how every feat of magic or heroism happened, but showing the audience just enough to let them fill in the blanks how they see fit. There's no extended digression explaining how David's sling works; the knowledge that he's guided by holy might is enough. Taking a religious approach to the narrative is what elevated the original trilogy above that of all the heaps of formulaic action movies to follow, because it asked the audience to have faith in something they can't explain. Thankfully, Abrams is well aware that Oz is only interesting when people think there's an actual wizard running it.

I latched onto John Boyega's Finn, not because of his inherent cheesiness (dude is thirsty, let's be honest), but because of his breathing. He might be the best heavy breathing, stare-off-into-distance actor of this era, and I mean that in all seriousness. Finn coming to grips with his surroundings is—I'll put it this way, I did a lot of swearing when Finn was on the screen—one of the best show, not tell devices of the film. I had no idea what was going to come of him in the film.

This didn't happen in the prequels, in which Lucas gave just enough info about all the key characters for you not to wonder what's going to happen, or really care. On the other hand, I love the argument that Grand Moff Tarkin is the most competent person in the original trilogy's universe precisely because his lack of backstory makes such speculation possible. The fact that Tarkin is essentially a throwaway character, but carries so much weight, is a sign of Lucas's willingness to let the story live on his own. Had Tarkin been in the prequels, he would have ended up with an extended dream sequence to lay down backstory that a) is unnecessary and b) can't compete with the audience's own imagination.

The leaps of faith inspired by the original trilogy are the reason we still talk about them. George Lucas is a talented storyteller, sure, and shows a brilliance for developing characters to play the roles he knows an audience can connect with. But the original trilogy is so resonant because its effect is like that of poetry: he left enough unsaid for anyone with passion to apply their own interpretation. He is just successful enough at suspending belief at just the right moments for moviegoers to view the film through their own lens.

It's a sign of confidence, not bludgeoning audiences over the head, for Lucas to have described the two camps as light and dark, and just leave it at that. It leaves a vacuum in the story that's filled by the mystery of the Force, a brilliantly simple device that helps the audience examine the story from endless angles, with a freedom that lets Luke's retelling as a religious warrior feel plausible enough.

Contrast that to the prequels, in which Lucas attempts to build out an epic space opera that'd normally be relegated to sprawling books written by the likes of Peter F. Hamilton. I watched the prequels last weekend for the first time in ages, and they're enjoyable, if quite cumbersome. Nothing in the films is free from an attempt at explanation. Take Obi-Wan's lengthy detour to learn about the clone army. What he finds is right in the name: it's an army, made of clones. Okay! We can all figure out what that means without an extended attempt at humanizing them by talking about their upbringing, training, and inherent machine-like qualities. They're literally designed to be faceless automatons, and yet here we are learning just enough about them to eliminate any mystery. "Wonder no more, here's how it all works!" Lucas seems to say, forgetting that the wonder is what made everything work in the first place.

Even in close to seven hours of video, Lucas still is unable to do justice to the labyrinthine story he took on. Instead of letting the inherent religiosity of the series soak through—we're talking about righteous, magic-wielding warriors defending the universe from pure evil, for god's sake—the movies get mired in backstory to a saga we already knew the ending to. There's nothing more indicative of this unfinished obsessiveness over detail than Lucas explaining the Force, the most important mystic device of the series, with a neglected and inexplicable reference to the nonsense biology of midichlorians.

The prequels were Lucas's encyclopedia, the place where he tried to answer every possible question left from the original trilogy. The Force Awakens doesn't worry about why it exists, it just does. While the film is filled with references to the original trilogy, it's through its new sense of theological purpose, and Abrams's uncanny ability to make moments with characters feel way too personal, that The Force Awakens brings back the mysticism of the originals.

Powering that darkness isn't an above-average politician with magic blood in a sea full of incompetents, but ideology. The movie is unabashedly religious: As if Kylo Ren's cross-shaped lightsaber wasn't sign enough, the First Order, the new bad guys, have turned worshipping the dark side of the Force into an experience that's explicitly churchly. And while I'm not saying the Pope is evil, there's no denying the institution carries a deep-seated weight that feels like monks chanting in your head. Abrams has taken that base feeling and repurposed it into Supreme Leader Snoke, who is driving a dark side that feels less predictable and ultimately more dangerous than in the past. Darth Vader scared his own people, and the Emperor is a political operator who ends up pulling strings in the shadows. Stoke, who chills in one of the most terrifying temples I've seen, is someone who can inspire the hordes to fight a holy war.

There's a scene in The Force Awakens that relies on a soft light pouring in through a high-up window—this is where things go full church—that easily could have felt overwrought. But because the stakes are left entirely unsaid, instead of having been laid out in an extended monologue, the light through the window is less a cliché, and more a visual jumping-off point for the speculation that completes the story.

The dark side's emphasis on black interior decoration and a general presentation stolen from the Nazi playbook has always been a bit hamfisted, but here, those visuals are balanced with a vibe ripped out of an ancient, spooky cathedral. The focus on religious imagery inherent to the cinematography lends a feeling of old, infrastructural, all-knowing strength that the scattered Empire never had. And because the Force feels less like a parlor trick—look, lightning fingers!—and more like zealous power, for the first time, the dark side of the Force feels genuinely evil.

The move is gritty, which was a much-needed departure; as the first in the new trilogy, it focuses more on establishing the dark side than the light, which adds to the intensity. But the reason it feels like a proper Star Wars film, and not just another action flick, is the fact that Abrams managed to cram enough narrative breadth into it without feeling the need to talk over the action with half-baked explanations. Yes, Han Solo is the mayor of Quip City, Kylo Ren is the Bad Dude with a Bad Attitude, and Rey is explicitly made out to be an unknown quantity, which is a bit blunt in its own right. But their stories weave together in a way that's more willing to chalk things up to divine fate than a story about political intrigue ever could have been.

Making a heroic epic true to the form means relying on the audience to fill in the blanks for themselves a bit, and by doing so Abrams created an expansive film where so much crazy shit happens—seriously, there's very little rest in this film—without it bogging down.

At its core, Star Wars has a deeply silly premise: a small band of religious warriors defend the entire universe thanks to a mystic energy that's some sort of amalgamation of every warrior theology ever. The only way to make it work is to not look at it too hard, because the audience has to be able to buy in. (That said, there is one planning scene where the dialogue is so forced that I broke out laughing.)

I think upon watching again, I might just get a bit tired of the lack of subtlety in the parade of homages to the original trilogy, but all the blunt in-jokes eventually take a back seat to a film that is both designed to reestablish Star Wars's bonafides and open up an entirely new saga. I have no idea what's going to come next, and that feels good.