Star Wars creator George Lucas has long claimed that his first three movies, Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi were the middle trio of what would be a total of nine movies. After Jedi in 1983, he didn't speculate on when he would do any of the other six or in what order he would do them. The three prequels began with The Phantom Menace in 1999 and earned widespread derision. After Revenge of the Sith in 2005, Lucas was said to be done with the story entirely, and even sold the property to the Disney company in 2012. Fans gained something of a new hope that Disney would step in and complete the final three movies now that Lucas was mostly out of the loop. That in fact happened, and so The Force Awakens, episode seven in the nine-episode saga, opened today.
While the defeat of the Emperor broke the Empire's power and allowed the restoration of the Galactic Republic, not all went smoothly for our central trio of characters. Han Solo and Leia Organa proved to have difficulty sustaining their relationship, and a betrayal by one of his Jedi students led Luke Skywalker to vanish from sight and pursue a lonely hermitage. Some Imperial forces have rallied around a banner called the First Order, and to counter them General Leia has organized a Resistance. Both pursue information on Luke's whereabouts, and the quest winds up at the planet Jakku, where it ensnares a scavenger woman named Rey and a deserting stormtrooper named Finn. The information to find Luke has been hidden in a droid, the rolling BB-8, and it's vital that the info get to the Resistance before the First Order uses its immense Starkiller weapon to destroy the words on which the Resistance is based.
This should all seem awfully familiar to anyone who's ever watched Star Wars or heard much about it in the almost 40 years since it was released, since it follows almost beat-for-beat the dilemmas our heroes encountered in the first movie, only bigger and louder. In case you miss that point, a holographic briefing displays the original Death Star to compare it to the Starkiller weapon.
Abrams seems to be attempting a sort of soft reboot of the franchise, retelling key elements of the original story in a somewhat more realistic manner. John Boyega and Daisy Ridley are both better actors than Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher were in 1977, which helps, and the best performer of the original trio, Harrison Ford, carries most of the narrative weight given to them in the new story. It's still Star Wars, of course, which means there are only tendencies towards realism instead of actual realism; this is not a Ronald-Moore style reboot of Battlestar Galactica.
The Force Awakens is not at all a bad slam-bang popcorn movie, but it faces significant obstacles of its own and creates several more for episodes eight and nine. Whatever the faults of his prequels -- and they are legion -- George Lucas made movies that had some reason for being. How did Luke's father become who he was and do what he did? They weren't strictly necessary by any means, but they at least answered already existing questions.
Abrams' sequels have to create the questions. They're telling us a story, but can they tell us why they're still telling the story of people who already won? "Well, what happened to Luke and Leia and Han after Jedi?" is waaaay to generic a question to drive a story. Return of the Jedi left a pretty satisfying conclusion in place: Emperor dead, Empire defeated, everybody's relationships clarified, Anakin Skywalker turned back from the Dark Side of the Force. So why are we still toiling around with these people? Abrams is pretty much chained into using the main characters from the earlier movies or else there's no point in calling what he's doing Star Wars, but is there a "so what?" to go with the "what?"
As of the end of The Force Awakens, there's not -- which leaves us looking to the next movies to provide one and leaves The Force Awakens a lot weaker.
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