It’s been just over ten years since we all settled down in a darkened theater and held our breaths to watch the first new Star Wars movie since the prequels unfolded on the big screen. Watching The Force Awakens was a weird experience.
First reactions and feelings were pretty good. It definitely didn’t seem to suck. Then we got home, climbed into bed, started to think about it… and the whole thing just fell apart.
Now, a decade later and having given these thoughts a while to stew thoroughly, I have come to a conclusion about The Force Awakens.
The biggest issue is simply that it doesn’t make a lick of sense.
Intergalactic Nonsense
The Force Awakens had a pretty straightforward mission. It was to arrive in 2015, and it had to bring Star Wars back after the prequel era.
It had to satisfyingly introduce a new generation of heroes. It had to give the original generation of fans, many of them now parents themselves, the one thing they had waited over 30 years to see: the reunion of Luke, Han, and Leia.
The Force Awakens successfully managed exactly one of those things. It arrived in 2015.
Given some analytical thought now, more than a decade later, the movie becomes a fascinating artefact.
A glossy, expensive, beautifully photographed cover band performance of Star Wars.
It’s the cinematic equivalent of a Vegas tribute act that has incredible lighting, amazing costumes, and absolutely no original material whatsoever.
At the center of it all is J.J. Abrams. A man who can stage a gorgeous shot, frame a scene like a Renaissance painting, but who should probably never be allowed within fifty feet of a screenplay.
Abrams is many things. He’s energetic. He’s enthusiastic. He’s capable of making movies that look fantastic.
But originality? Narrative cohesion? Paying off story setups? Those are apparently optional DLC that never got installed.
So we get a film that feels like a lightweight tour through Star Wars Greatest Hits until it suddenly slams on the brakes and murders a well-loved character in the most narratively baffling, and totally deaf, way imaginable.
And that’s not the only thing that makes no sense.
A Droid With Depression
R2-D2 spends most of the movie in what can only be described as a robot depression nap. He’s powered down. Nobody knows why. Nobody seems particularly concerned.
Then, right at the end of the film, when the heroes suddenly need the rest of Luke’s map, R2 just wakes up and goes, “Oh, hey guys, I had the rest of the map the whole time.”
And that’s it.
No explanation. No reason. No attempt to justify it. He just had it. He didn’t stay with Luke, though. Did he fly the X-Wing back from wherever Luke is hiding himself, then just shut down? Clearly not, as we see the X-Wing still there in later movies.
This is what storytelling looks like when the writers back themselves into a corner and solve it by shrugging loudly.
Speaking of that damn map…
Luke As Pirate Treasure
Think about this for a moment. Luke Skywalker, legendary Jedi hero, disappears.
So what do people do? Well, somebody, somewhere creates a map to him.
Why? Who made this map? Why does everyone know about it? Why is it split into pieces like a pirate treasure map?
And why does one of the pieces randomly end up with Max Von Sydow on a USB stick from Space Best Buy? If Luke wanted to disappear, why was there a map to him at all?
The entire premise of the film depends on this map existing, yet the movie never stops to explain the logic behind it for even a second. It is almost as if the writers either didn’t care or hoped you wouldn’t notice.
Reaction To The Rise Of The First Order
Similarly nonsensical is the existence of the First Order and the reaction of the galaxy to them. The original trilogy ends with the Empire defeated. Galaxy-wide celebrations. Fireworks. Ewok helmet drumming.
Thirty years later, somehow the Empire is back, except now it’s called the First Order, and apparently nobody in the galaxy cares.
No fleet is mobilized. No lingering fear of what has happened before causes any survival instincts to kick in.
It is like World War II ended, then suddenly the Nazis are back, and the Allies respond by ignoring it.
The Death Star… But Stupider
In the Abrams philosophy of storytelling, if something worked once, the best move is to do it again… but bigger. Thus, Starkiller Base.
It’s a Death Star. But it’s also a planet. That eats a sun. And fires a beam that destroys multiple planets. Which somehow are visible in the sky of another planet like fireworks at Disney World.
The physics here are so aggressively nonsensical that they make my brain hurt. But the bigger problem is conceptual.
The original Death Star was terrifying because it was new. Having Death Star 2 already diluting the punch in Return Of The Jedi, by the time we get here it all feels like reheated leftovers.
Han Solo’s Arc Is A Circle
When we last saw Han Solo he was a war hero, a general, and a key figure in overthrowing the Empire in a developing, stable relationship with a growing group of friends around him.
Thirty years later? He’s back to smuggling.
Because apparently, his entire character arc from the original trilogy got reset like a corrupted save file. Worse, he’s bad at smuggling. He owes money to multiple gangs, is hauling around tentacle monsters called Rathtars, and seems generally confused about how his own life works.
Less the legendary hero aging into a mentor, and more the divorced uncle trying to relive college.
His story, and our film, stops dead in the middle for a slapstick monster chase involving tentacled beasts, criminal gangs, and a hallway full of screaming that have absolutely nothing to do with the plot.
Seriously, you could remove the entire sequence and the story would continue unchanged. It does achieve one thing; however, it feels exactly like a scene from a different movie that wandered in by accident. So very on-brand for Abrams.
Mystery Box Of Lightsaber
Luke’s lightsaber falls into Cloud City at the end of The Empire Strikes Back, and thirty years later, it’s in a treasure chest in a space bar owned by Maz Kanata.
How did she get it? Her response:
“That’s a story for another time.”
That would be fair enough in other circumstances, but here and now in this movie, it becomes the moment when you realize the movie isn’t interested in answers, so it certainly isn’t interested in you and what you want.
It’s interested in “mystery boxes”, Abrams’ favorite storytelling technique, where you set up a question and hope someone else figures out the answer later.
Vader Cosplay
Kylo Ren is the villain, and he worships Darth Vader, talking to Vader’s burned helmet like it’s a motivational poster. On paper, this might have seemed like a good idea, but here come those pesky thoughts with their goddamn logic again.
Kylo actually knows the truth about Vader. He knows who he was. He knows of his exploits as Anakin, and he knows he redeemed himself. He knows Vader killed the Emperor to save Luke.
So why is he worshipping the guy’s five minutes of evil instead of his last act of heroism?
It’s ignoring the entire ending of Return of the Jedi because it is inconvenient. But that’s the Abrams method: move fast enough, and maybe nobody will notice.
Playing In God Mode
Rey has never flown the Millennium Falcon. She flies it perfectly. She has never used the Force. She mind-tricks a stormtrooper.
She has never used a lightsaber. She beats a trained dark-side warrior.
Whatever happened to a hero’s journey? Discovering their potential?
There’s Been A Murder!
All of these problems pale compared to the movie’s biggest mistake. The one that fundamentally broke the promise of the sequel trilogy.
Han Solo dies before reuniting with Luke and Leia. Think about that.
The original trio – Luke, Han, and Leia – defined Star Wars. Fans waited decades to see them together again. It was the single biggest emotional payoff the sequel trilogy could deliver.
And the movie just… doesn’t do it. Instead, it throws it all away for a cheap emotional gut punch. Han dies not even halfway through the new trilogy, murdered by his moody son while standing on a suspiciously dramatic bridge that might as well have had a sign reading:
‘Character Tragic Death Platform’
The moment is actually powerful, but incredibly frustrating and actually anxiety-inducing because the film spends two hours being a breezy nostalgia tour and then suddenly drops a Shakespearean tragedy out of nowhere right into the middle of it. It’s tonally jarring.
It’s like being on a theme park ride where the final loop is designed to decapitate the front three rows of riders.
A Beautifully Shot Cover Song
Here’s another frustrating thing about The Force Awakens.
It looks amazing. The cinematography is gorgeous. The effects are great. The Millennium Falcon chase through the Star Destroyer wreckage is spectacular.
Abrams understands spectacle. But storytelling?
That’s where things collapse. Because The Force Awakens isn’t really a new story. It’s a remix. A cover version of A New Hope with the volume turned up.
Desert orphan with secret destiny – check
Droid carrying important data – check
Cantina scene – check
Planet-destroying superweapon – check
Trench run finale – check
It’s all there. Just rearranged and blatant. When the movie does try to do something bold, like killing Han Solo, it undermines the emotional foundation of the entire saga.
The Abrams Problem
J.J. Abrams has a very particular creative style. He’s incredible at beginnings. He sets up mysteries. He creates intrigue. He asks big questions. But he rarely answers them, or when he does, the answers often feel improvised.
That’s why so much of The Force Awakens feels like a placeholder. It’s a movie full of setups waiting for someone else to deliver the payoff. Unfortunately, the sequels that followed only made the confusion worse, completely ignoring many of these threads that were left dangling.
As a result, it becomes further diminished by its own sequels.
A Decade Has Passed
Looking back, The Force Awakens feels less like the start of a new trilogy and more like a nervous studio reboot. It’s cautious. It’s derivative. It’s obsessed with recreating the past rather than building the future.
I could still watch Han and Chewie having adventures as a double act all day long, and Chewie gets all the best lines in this movie, which you only know from Han’s responses. So while it probably succeeded in reminding audiences why they loved Star Wars, it struggled to explain why this new story needed to exist at all.
Because when you strip away the nostalgia, the mystery boxes, and the gorgeous visuals, you’re left with a movie that still doesn’t make much sense. As a result, the trilogy never quite recovered from that first, fatal misstep.
Still. At least it had good lighting.
