Back when it came out, Star Wars: The Force Awakens played like a straightforward homage to 1977’s Star Wars. It was plenty fun, but wasn’t all that deep. Now that I’ve seen its follow-up, The Last Jedi, The Force Awakens seems a lot more interesting.
The Last Jedi and The Force Awakens Spoilers Ahead!
I’ve seen The Last Jedi twice now. I liked it the first time, and my appreciation only grew on my second viewing. I was just as aware of its pacing and screenplay problems, but I also developed a better appreciation for what the movie does right and how intentionally it does those things. I’ve said it before: Most things are better the second time around.
On my initial viewing of The Last Jedi, I found the first half of the movie to be enjoyable but a bit rote, largely because I was assuming that the good guys’ plan would work in the end. Second time around, I knew that their plan would not only fail, but fail so spectacularly that hundreds of Resistance members would needlessly die. Other things I knew going into that second viewing: Snoke was kind of a joke, Kylo Ren was a mixed up dope, Poe needed to drop the hotshot bit and become a better leader, Rey was not descended from Jedi royalty, and Luke largely saw himself as a failure. Once I knew all that, it made the movie’s initially less gripping first half a lot more interesting.
A couple days after my second viewing of The Last Jedi, I rewatched The Force Awakens. Unsurprisingly, I found that just as I liked parts of The Last Jedi more once I knew what was going to happen, I also liked its predecessor more now that I knew what came after it. Here are a few things from The Force Awakens that felt interestingly different after watching The Last Jedi.
Rey seems a lot cooler when you know she’s just some rando.
I had forgotten how laden with mystery Rey was in The Force Awakens. Characters spend the first half of the movie asking “who is that girl?” We in the audience are meant to ask the same thing. Who is she? She’s gotta be someone, right? This is Star Wars!
Star Wars is dominated by this pervasive feeling that everything you’re watching has been rehearsed ahead of time. It’s not a bad thing; it’s just part and parcel with the hokey space opera of it all. The Force has chosen these people to be in these places at these times, all so that they can play their roles in a carefully staged contest between light and dark. When a Star Wars movie introduces a new character like Rey, we’re conditioned to assume that she’s going to have a surprising backstory linking her with the main Star Wars cast.
There are those who doubt Kylo Ren’s Last Jedi revelation (confirmed, more or less, by Rey) that her parents were no-account losers who sold her for drinking money. I’m firmly in the camp that believes he’s telling the truth, which makes Rey’s scenes in The Force Awakens much more interesting. She really is just some nobody scavenger, chosen by the Force for reasons she doesn’t understand. That fact, along with the hint at the end of The Last Jedi that other random people around the galaxy are developing Force powers, changes my read on what “the Force awakens” even means in the first place.
At the outset of TFA, Rey is clearly a huge fan of the legendary heroes of the original trilogy. She eats dinner while wearing an old Rebel helmet, is amazed when she hears the name Luke Skywalker, and has a fan freakout upon meeting thHan Solo. She generally spends most of The Force Awakens acting surprised to find herself as the Jedi-imbued heroine of a Star Wars movie. But she isn’t Ben Kenobi’s granddaughter, nor Kylo Ren’s cousin, nor anything like that. She’s just some person who up until now has sat alone on a planet, finding shade in the wreckage of an AT-AT, dreaming of a lost age of heroism and lying to herself about her sad, unremarkable life. It makes her much more relatable, and renders her bravery and heroism throughout both films all the more remarkable.
Finn’s cowardice sets up his actions in the next movie.
Finn’s arc in Force Awakens also benefits from a viewing of The Last Jedi. In the first movie, his character’s development mostly involves him overcoming his (understandable) fear of the First Order. Maz Kanata immediately pegs him as someone who wants to run, and for most of the movie, that’s just what he does. It isn’t until the First Order captures Rey that Finn finally finds his courage and does something brave (and stupid) by lying to everyone about his firsthand knowledge of Starkiller Base, trusting that the Force will see him through. (Han, furious: “That’s not how the Force works!”)
The Last Jedi continues Finn’s arc in a way that feels organic and true to his character. Immediately after waking up from his coma, he continues overcompensating for his past cowardice. He sets out on one dangerous mission after another, with his new friend Rose following and, gradually, helping him see how he’s swung too far in the other direction. By the end of the movie, even Poe is holding him back from dashing off yet again into danger.
As I rewatched Finn’s early, terrified scenes in The Force Awakens, I kept thinking how cool it was that the most recent major plot turn for this character involved a heroic, thwarted suicide run on a New Order battering ram. I’m interested to see where everyone winds up by the end of Episode IX, but I’m probably most interested in what happens to Finn.
Kylo Ren comes off as even more of a dorky wannabe.
Early on in The Last Jedi, Supreme Leader Snoke mocks Kylo Ren’s helmet, telling him to “take that ridiculous thing off.” Kylo subsequently throws a humiliated elevator temper tantrum and destroys the helmet. In that moment as in the rest of the film, The Last Jedi pitilessly exposes Kylo Ren as the pathetic Darth Vader wannabe he is. He spends the movie stomping around with all the rigid self-loathing of a young person unsuccessfully willing their phony self-image to stop disintegrating.
The Force Awakens was also happy to undercut Ren’s seeming badassness on occasion. But for the first half of the movie, he mostly gets to come off as the scary monster-man he so clearly wishes he was. He freezes a blaster beam in midair, and pays Poe back for his insolence by ripping into his mind and stealing the truth about BB-8. He force-chokes one of his officers just like gramps used to do. He stores his cool-guy helmet on a pedestal holding the ashes of the people he’s killed. Oh, you big, scary man!
Snoke’s cutting remark about the helmet in The Last Jedi laid bare something we already knew: that Ben Kenobi is basically just a punk. That knowledge dramatically undercuts those early Force Awakens scenes where he’s meant to be an imposing, Vader-like figure. Right from the start, he’s just a kid in a costume, playing at being tough. In some ways, it makes him pathetic. Considering the body count he racks up over course of the movie, it also makes him extremely dangerous.
It’s fun if you know that Snoke kind of sucks.
Snoke’s first appearance in The Force Awakens is meant to be awe-inspiring. He appears to be this chamber-filling monster on a throne, and only at the end of the scene is his holographic trickery revealed. That flickering led to plenty of fan speculation about Snoke’s true identity (and size) over the intervening years. The Last Jedi reveals him to be… basically just kind of this dude.
Snoke is a disappointing villain in The Last Jedi. That’s partly because of his dull character design, but partly, I think, because he was meant to be disappointing. One of The Last Jedi‘s main themes is that at some point, disciples outgrow their mentors. The flip side of that theme is that all mentors will eventually disappoint their disciples or, at the very least, be unable to teach them anything more. Almost every mentor figure in the film fails in some way or another, and Snoke is no different.
For most of The Force Awakens, Snoke was this unknowable menace lurking in the shadows. It’s pretty enjoayble to rewatch those scenes with the knowledge that, in truth, he’s just some knobble-headed jabroni who’s gonna die like an arsehole.
Rey’s lightsaber vision gets some new layers.
No one sequence in The Force Awakens set more fans theorizing than the vision Rey receives when she first touches Obi-Wan’s old lightsaber. The Last Jedi makes the whole thing make much more sense, in part simply because it seems to indicate that all three movies have been planned out in advance, at least to some extent. It seems likely we’ll see the rest of those scenes as flashbacks in Episode IX, but even if we don’t, it’s all but confirmed that they aren’t just abstract visions: they actually happened.
In the vision, Rey gets a quick teaser from The Last Jedi featuring Luke and R2-D2 watching as the Jedi temple burns. We see Rey seemingly being torn away from her parents, and we see Kylo standing in the rain alongside some hooded figures that we can only guess are the still-mysterious Knights of Ren. That’s all plenty interesting, especially knowing as we do now that Rey’s parents were just some jerks who sold her off, and that Kylo spared a few of his fellow trainees at Luke’s temple. The vision is also interesting because it tells both Rey and but Kylo’s stores, and because it was sparked when Rey touched Obi-Wan’s lightsaber — the very lightsaber she and Kylo snapped in two at the end of The Last Jedi.
The constant fan-service lands a little differently.
The Force Awakens was an unusually self-referential movie. The main characters tended to mirror the audience’s excitement that there was a new Star Wars at all, regularly exalting in the fact that they were flying the Millennium Falcon, or meeting Han, and Leia, and Chewie. That excitement — Star Wars is back! Hooray! — worked fine on its own. But it’s much more interesting now that I know it was setting up the failure, disappointment, and subverted expectations of The Last Jedi.
In one of The Force Awakens‘ most rapturous early scenes, the normally jaded Han Solo looks at Rey and says, “Crazy thing is, it’s true. The Force. The Jedi. All of it… it’s all true.” It’s a good scene that’s made better by the knowledge that in the next movie, Kylo Ren will turn to Rey in much the same way and say, “The Empire, your parents, the Resistance, the Sith, the Jedi… let the past die. Kill it, if you have to.” The obvious, intentional parallel between those two conflicting sentiments further underlines the notion this new, self-regarding trilogy has more to say about its legacy than simply, “Wasn’t Star Wars cool?”
The Force Awakens was about the joy of discovering that the legendary stories you grew up on were getting a new chapter. The heroes you worshipped as a kid were still out there, fighting the good fight. The Last Jedi is about the perils of that same fandom, and the fallibility of the idols you were initially so glad to see return. It’s a more complex and thematically interesting film, but it wouldn’t work nearly as well without the setup provided by its predecessor.
I recommend rewatching The Force Awakens after having seen The Last Jedi, even if you’ve watched the former film a half dozen times. Like many trilogy openers, it works better once you know what comes after it. Hopefully it will work even better once we know how it all ends.
Comments
41 responses to “Star Wars: The Last Jedi Makes The Force Awakens Much More Interesting”
Given the glaring mistakes in this article, I am going to presume Kirk isn’t a Star Wars fan.
It’s Luke’s lightsabre. Not Obi-Wan’s.
While it makes The Force Awakens better, it annihilates the development and accomplishments of the Prequels and Original Trilogy by resetting everything to zero.
So while The Last Jedi make its trilogy better, (to me at least) it’s to the detriment of the previous 6 movies (and Rebels / Clone Wars shows)
how so?
Because it reduces the efforts of the Rebellion, Obi-Wan and our heroes. All they fought for was destroyed as something more dangerous than the Empire appeared.
The Battle of Endor seems to trivial now that The First Order was able to destroy the Republic in a matter of seconds and reduce the Resistance/Rebellion to less than 20 people in a couple of days.
im kind of sick of all these super weapons that keeps coming up..
Star killer planets..
hyperspeed trackers
You think technology should just not evolve over long periods of time? Look at our own history, war brings faster advances in military tech, not slower ones.
And yet they somehow manage to build ships that all go the same speed…
…And the evolution of fast torpedoes are painfully slow magnetic bombs?
That dont even act magnetic and simply “fall”
Yes, because the movies would be gripping if the good guys constantly won everything, ruled the galaxy and peace and happiness reigned for all.
I mean seriously, did you stop to think?
Lol
Bad guys win in about half of the movies.
….and?
It’s seems like you think I just want one big happy ending.
I honestly don’t think you know what you want.
Lol. Alright bud
I thought it might make more sense for there to be – in the first movie – a second resurgence of the Sith. Something like Phantom Menace, where the good guys trying to rebuild a mostly democratic republic have to deal with a bunch of wannabe Emporers and Snoke – what a rubbish name, no coincidence it rhymes with Joke – manipulating events behind the scenes. Then for the second, maybe reveal that Snoke is the keeper of the Sith equivalent of the Jedi sacred texts, and he’s done with the whole one master, one student idea and started to recruit en masse from those planets that had it worst under the Empire.
Point is, there’s a lot more that could have been done differently and it still remain Star Wars. Right now it just seems like both movies have regurgitated scenes out from the OT, randomised the names and order a bit, repackaged it with a shiny new bow and served it up.
I mean for crying in a bucket, the First Order has both a new ‘Starkiller’ base AND Snoke’s m-f’ing Dreadnought built within 30 years? My sweaty bollocks!
“The vision is also interesting because it tells both Rey and but Kylo’s stores, and because it was sparked when Rey touched Obi-Wan’s lightsaber — the very lightsaber she and Kylo snapped in two at the end of The Last Jedi.”
You mean Anakins lightsaber right? Obi-wan defeated Anakin and stole the lightsaber, gave it to Luke who lost it on Bespin, it turns up again with Maz and is now destroyed.
@thatteemo “it annihilates the development and accomplishments of the Prequels” I personally don’t think they had any accomplishments, bit of fun at times. But thats it for mine. I understand where you are coming from on the development side
To be fair, Obi-Wan owned this lightsaber for longer than either Luke or Anakin did, even if he did just keep it locked in a trunk on Tatooine…
It’s Luke’s lightsaber right? Not Obi-wan’s.
I don’t know why nobody has look at Rey and seen the unstoppable demigod that is good at everything. Just point her towards the first order and tell her to kill. Everyone else can go get drinks on the beach and relax.
Star Wars Ep9: MaRey Sue Ex Machina
Pretty sure a ton of people have said that already. A ton more have also said, so she’s just like Luke then?
Except Luke was not very good at stuff in the first two movies. He even lost a hand proving how little he knows………how many bits has Rey had chopped off??
Absolutely.
Here’s a good comparison:
https://youtu.be/PE2at2Wo9sU
That is spectacular, and a brilliant demonstration of why the writing of these new films is rightfully maligned.
In fairness that was Lukes first duel, against one of (if not the) best lightsaber-wielders around, he got quite a bit better after that. Reys first fight in comparison was against a half-trained, severly wounded guy who seemed more interested in trying to convert her than kill her – and she spent 90% of the time running away before eventually letting some anger out and getting in a good hit against him (then the planet blew up). It wasn’t exactly duel of the fates level combat..
And yet she beat him…
Well yeah… As I said he was only half-trained, severely wounded and didn’t even seem to be giving it his all. Why is it so shocking that a girl who is apparently ‘strong with the force’ (just like Luke was) could beat that? She wasn’t fighting Vader in peak condition, she was fighting a punk bitch with a bowcaster blasted in his gut.
Kylo was still trained. Rey had no idea how to use the force, yet every time it called for it suddenly knew how to use powers instantly such as force grab and persuasion. Never practiced it but knew how to do it. Kylo wasn’t “half trained”, he just hadn’t completed it. Sure he was injured but he was still far more competent.
Question is actually why couldnt Finn beat him. A trained warrior since childhood of the first order, he stood zero chance. Rey however may have been proficient with a staff but this doesnt mean she can instantly use a lightsaber, a completely differentlt balanced weapon etc.
People hate the idea of Rey being a Mary Sue, even I said, if you check my history, that we needed TLJ to see her background to ensure we understood what training she had etc to understand why shes so good. But they explained nothing. Shes just “really good” as opposed to Luke who doesn’t qualify as a Gary Stu as he’s shown constantly training and messing up and failing (ESB is a movie entirely about failure).
One can be “strong with the force” but it doesnt make them unbeatable. Anakin was, Luke was and Kylo is. All require training of course. All have been bested by someone else better than them. But Rey is practically unbeatable. Poor writing is poor writing when it comes to Rey because for some reason, theyre afraid of her having weakness, which quite frankly, creates the most interesting aspects of the characters.
Luke had a 3 movie story arch over years to become a Jedi. Ray has no training and first time she picks up a lightsaber beats Kylo Ren and shows powers that no one else can do. Beats Luke Skywalker in a fight, flys the Millennium Falcon better then Han Solo. Dude if you dont understand why this film is garbage you and who ever did this bs full pice don’t understand how good character development or good movie making is done.
What powers? I guarantee there were no powers in either films that are exclusive to Rey…
Just a minor mistake – in regards to Rey’s lightsaber, it didn’t belong to Obi-Wan Kenobi (despite him at some stage having possession of it), it was made and primarily used by Anakin Skywalker before he became Darth Vader.
Came here to say this.
Good article 🙂
For me it’s like someone writing a new LoTR trilogy where Sauron has returned and retaken large parts of Middle-Earth. It doesn’t add anything new to the story. Might as well call the next one Star Wars: Return on Investment, have the rebels win against the odds, Ben Solo be redeemed with his dying breath and be done with it.
The standalone movies were a much better idea imo.
“…that Ben Kenobi is basically just a punk.”
I assume you mean Ben Organa-Solo?
I found that it makes The Force Awakens better simply because The Last Jedi is not a very good film. So yeah, of course the previous film comes off better. It also ruins all the characters in the previous film.
No. No it doesnt.
Rey has no story arch, go’s though no hardship, loses no one other then people she’s know for only a few days, no training not even a montage but yet single handedly beats Luke motherfucking Skywalker. All while given a wooden performance. Nothing is explained at all how the first order become so powerful. Nothing is said about Snoke and how he come about plus is kill off in a weak way after all that build up. I could go on but the most disrespectful bullshit was the treatment of Luke Skywalker. So you mean to tell me after the 3 movie story arch of Luke witch ends with him seeing the conflict and good in Vader do dose none of that for Ben Solo and Rey LOL explains basically word for word what Luke said to Vader about Ben Solo. And when shit go’s sideways he runs off to die on some island ????. All so why dose he leave a map if he go’s there to die ??. And you want to tell me this is good and acceptable???. Then gets beaten buy Rey LOL.
So you fell for the bit where Kylo was tricking both Rey to join him and Snoke into thinking he was about to kill Rey and he tells her she’s no one, her family were no ones. He didn’t say that just to distract her long enough to get enough strength to kill snoke on the QT