Tuesday, December 29, 2015

Star Wars for the New Generation

After a treacherous battle to find a baby sitter for Raphaela, I finally got out of the house and met up with a friend to see the new Star Wars film, The Force Awakens.

It took me back to the nine year old girl who saw George Lucas special effects, it was overall a thrilling and satisfying experience.

MINOR SPOILERS

I have two gripes with the story, one:  if you may recall from the first three movies (Episodes IV-VI), no matter how much Force Luke inherited from his father, he was a crappy Jedi for a long time, and only really confronted the Emperor and Darth Vader properly in the third movie.

In this movie, the two main young leads (Rey and Finn) find Luke's special light saber, pick it up, and not only do they connect immediately IE the light saber decides to turn on at all, but they are master swordswoman and man. In the first film of this series, with no apparent training at all, they are fighting with the light saber against Kylo Ren, the Big Bad, and Rey almost succeeds in killing him on her first go.

WTF. Or as Han Solo says in this movie, "That's not how the Force works!"

I think it is because this generation has no patience, and they expect that everything will work out for them right away, without any practice or any struggle to succeed. Or their parents will take care of it for them.  Harry Potter, Wonder Boy Wizard, is the "Boy that Lived."  So with all that magic inside him he is automatically prepared to travel around with Dumbledore and smite Voldemort, or become a vigilante Wizard with his friends Ron and Hermione.  And Harry isn't even aware of all the strings that are being pulled for him in the background by the adults around him.

We are raising a generation of lazy and entitled children, woe unto us.

My second gripe is derived more from a feminist stand point.  Rey is clearly being groomed to become a Class A Jedi, despite the fact that in the horrible prequel movies they made it clear that women are not capable of controlling the Force.  But Princess/General Leia ("There is another!") seems to have completely ignored her innate gift of the Force, using it only to sense that something bad has happened to someone she loves.  Why couldn't she have become a General and a Jedi Master, and why can she not find her brother, with whom she is telepathically linked via the Force, and their father Darth Vader?

It's almost 2016, and just because they have a woman and a black man as the new generation of Jedi, doesn't mean that they have done enough to restore the honor of all potential female Jedi warriors who came before them.

Oh, and as a bonus gripe, why can't they come up with a version of the Death Star that does not have a small but fatal structural flaw? Just saying...


3 comments:

deeps said...

so is it a good movie?

Doc said...

Yes, I enjoyed watching it. It was technically well done, with the plot more or less the same as Episode IV. The nostalgia factor is huge and the actors were charming.

deeps said...

I just ran through many of the daily happenings you have vividly narrated over here…you are a brave and different woman I must say at the beginning. Or perhaps I know little about many other women like you. Just like your knack of writing, you have a determined plan for life.. despite missing the train you seem to know where you are travelling.