Film Review: Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015)

It's about time someone made a good Star Wars movie. It's taken nearly forty years, but director J.J. Abrams has finally made an entry in this franchise that I could watch without wincing. To be fair, The Empire Strikes Back was pretty good, but that was because George Lucas handed the directing chores to Irvin Kershner, an old pro with a solid, if unspectacular, filmography. Three of the next four films were directed by Lucas and the results proved that George was something of an alchemist; he was able to turn the base metal of his negligible talent into box office gold.

As you may have guessed, I've never cared for the Star Wars films. I didn't see the original film until 1979, two years after it came out. I was twenty-two, had one year of film school under my belt, my favourite directors were Sidney Lumet and Sergio Leone, and I may have been a film snob. When I finally saw Star Wars I was astounded by the special effects and utterly gobsmacked by the bad acting, rubbish dialogue, and spastic action sequences. The subsequent films directed by Lucas added more proof to my conviction that he shouldn't be allowed near actors, a typewriter or a Panaflex camera.

The Force Awakens is, more or less, a reboot of the first film in the series, with the Death Star being upsized to a Death Planet. The Empire (now called the First Order) is a firm believer in the "go big or go home" adage when it comes to weapons of mass destruction, although after this latest expensive setback they'll probably be considering using Death Uber. Anyway, if you've seen the first one you've pretty much seen The Force Awakens. What makes this one such a pleasure is that is everything about the film that requires imaginative skill is done with wit, energy and professionalism. The acting is almost uniformly excellent, the script is smart, witty and lean, and Abrams, unlike Lucas, knows how to choreograph the non-space action scenes. The actors are led by Daisy Ridley as Rey, who I like to think of as Keira Knightley 2.0. That's a compliment. John Boyega as Finn, the renegade strormtrooper, was a revelation to me. I hated him in Attack the Block, but here he steals just about every scene he's in. Harrison Ford is reliably grumpy and cocky. And all the actors get dialogue that's blissfully unclunky and frequently funny

One aspect of the previous films that remains untouched is the determined avoidance of anything to do with sexuality or romantic relationships. The Stars Wars universe is a chaste universe, almost Victorian, in fact. Across the seven films in the franchise there's been some mild flirting, a very few kisses, and only one out and out romance: the union between Annakin and Padme that results in Luke's birth. This last episode is also notorious as perhaps the most badly written, acted and directed section in any of the films. You get the feeling Lucas hated having to film this subject matter. Not that Lucas is a prude. His American Graffitti is all about rambunctious teenage hormones. What Lucas probably realized was that part of the appeal of his films was that they offer a universe free from the angst, terror, tension and embarrassment of desire. This is a universe in which the characters (and the audience) only have to be concerned with issues of bravery, loyalty, resourcefulness, and derring-do. No one worries about being popular or loved. I think this is the ingredient x that made these films such a massive hit with the 8-24 demographic. Star Wars was, and is, their "safe place," a world that offers a holiday from the scary land of personal relationships.

There are some problems. The latest R2D2 iteration, a droid called BB-8, apparently comes with an algorithm that forces it to do something cute every second time it appears on screen. This got old very fast and for the next film I hope our lovable little droid is clubbed into scrap with the cold, dead body of an Ewok. The chief bad guy and Darth Vader fanboy is Kylo Ren, who (SPOILER AHEAD) turns out to be the son of Han Solo and Princess Leia. This seems like a colossal case of bad parenting, but the whole issue is kind of glossed over. Oh well, every family's got to have at least one world-destroying megalomaniac with a helmet fetish. Finally, Oscar Isaac gets the role of Poe Dameron, a gung ho fighter pilot who whoops and hollers as he goes into combat. You get the idea that his role will be expanded in the next film, but what they're starting with is pretty poor. Poe is a grab bag of cliches, and it wastes Isaac's talents in a big way. Also, what's up with that name? Am I missing some in-joke or connection to Con Air? The Nicolas Cage character in that film was named Cameron Poe. Is this a hint that Cage will be the big reveal in the next film? Will he be pulling off a helmet and announcing that he's somebody's long-lost relative? Please let him be Han Solo's younger, crazier, weird-ass brother--Charlie Solo.

Where Are All the American Actors?

Jon Lovitz, the last of the great American actors

In the last month I've seen Looper, Dredd 3D and The Bourne Legacy. What they all have in common, aside from being slick and violent, is that they offer proof that while the Brits managed to lose America over 200 years ago, in the last 20 or so years they've mounted a determined campaign, with the aid of their Commonwealth allies and some Irish mercenaries, to retake the American colonies via the entertainment industry, one movie and TV series at a time. Brits Emily Blunt and Rachel Weisz are in, respectively, Looper and Bourne, and Kiwi Karl Urban stars in Dredd. All three play American characters, and the question has to be asked, why weren't Yanks picked for the roles? There's nothing special about any of these roles, especially in the case of Judge Dredd, a part which doesn't ask an actor to do anything except growl his lines and hide his face behind a helmet. You'd think a director or producer's natural inclination would be to hire an American actor to play an American character, but increasingly that's not the case. The list I've assembled below is, in a very non-scientific way, a guide showing how non-US actors have been scooping up roles that once upon a time would only have been given to Americans. I've listed the actors by country and then the films in which they play American characters.

Brits

Jude Law: Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, Cold Mountain, Road to Perdition, The Talented Mr. Ripley, All the King's Men
Ewan McGregor: Black Hawk Down, Big Fish, Down With Love, The Island, Amelia, I Love You Philip Morris
Gerard Butler: The Ugly Truth, Gamer, Law Abiding Citizen, The Bounty Hunter, Machine Gun Preacher
Daniel Craig: Infamous, The Invasion, Cowboys & Aliens
Kate Winslet: The Life of David Gale, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Little Children, Revolutionary Road
Rachel Weisz: The Shape of Things, Dream House, Confidence, Runaway Jury
Liam Neeson: Battleship, Taken, Unknown, The A-Team

The Irish

Colin Farrell: Uh, virtually everything he's done.
Colm Meaney: Con Air, Law Abiding Citizen
Brendan Gleason: Lake Placid, Green Zone, Safe House, The Company You Keep
Michael Fassbender: Inglourious Basterds, Jonah Hex, 

Canucks

Ryan Gosling, Jim Carrey, Keanu Reeves and Ryan Reynolds: Every role you can think of.

Aussies and Kiwis

Like the Canadians, Down Under actors snag American roles virtually every time they get a call from their agents: Russell Crowe, Eric Bana, Sam Neill, Cate Blanchett, Toni Collette, Sam Worthington, Hugh Jackman, and Nicole Kidman have all played Americans in more films than I can be bothered to mention.

The above lists barely scratch the surface. I haven't even mentioned Brits on American TV like Idris Elba, Hugh Laurie, Dominic West and Damian Lewis, and then there are all the supporting actors like Tom Wilkinson. And I also forgot Daniel Day-Lewis. D'oh!

This phenomenon is definitely of recent vintage. In the 1970s and '80s  American films were filled with American actors playing American characters. There were odd exceptions, like Robert Shaw in Jaws, but for the most part non-US actors only played roles that were nationality-appropriate. In the '90s things began to change, but the symbolic turning point may have been Batman Begins in 2005. Batman is an iconic red, white and blue comic book character and had been played by a succession of  American actors, but when the time came for a reboot the reins were handed over to an English actor, Christian Bale, and, for good measure, Englishman Christoper Nolan was given the directing job. That seemed to open the floodgates. American actors are still dominant in comedies (Adam Sandler, Ben Stiller) and as voice actors in animated films, but in other genres they compete for, and often lose out on, roles that a generation ago would not even have been offered to non-Americans.

Why has this come about? I see three possible reasons. The first is that the US doesn't have the minor league system, as it were, that the UK does. Look through the bios of any of the Brit actors I listed above and you'll find that they did lots of theatre work, both pro and amateur, as well as stints in drama schools, before getting their big breaks. As well, Brit TV has traditionally produced dramatic programming that asks a lot of its actors. Broadway and off-Broadway theatre produced a lot of the great American actors of the '70s (Pacino, Hoffman, Hackman), but that incubator has been almost wiped out by the dominance of mega-musicals and high real estate prices pushing out small theatres. Check out the bios of major American actors and it often seems that they simply drifted into acting when another career choice didn't pan out. Johnny Depp started out in punk bands and Shia LaBeouf began as a standup comic. Simply put, American actors don't have the training and experience foreign actors do.

Another reason for the shortage of American actors is that US producers seem to favour finding domestic actors, on the male side, who embody innocence and naivety, and who as part of that image have a pretty, baby-faced look. Depp, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Tom Cruise, and Leonardo DiCaprio began their careers as toy boys, typically playing the newbie, the neophyte, the young hotshot who challenges an older male (Cruise vs Nicholson in A Few Good Men) or learns the ropes from a veteran (Pitt and Robert Redford in Spy Game). By comparison, Russell Crowe, who is slightly younger than both Cruise and Pitt, has never played a raw rookie in a major film, and the same could be said of Liam Neeson or Daniel Craig. Cruise and DiCaprio's respective careers were built on playing the cute new kid on the block. This kind of typecasting of American actors has meant that looks and a specific acting skill-set has taken precedence over overall acting ability. To put it another way, non-Americans get the mature roles, Americans get the immature parts.

Finally, American TV deserves part of the blame for reducing the depth of homegrown acting talent. In the 1990s the primetime network schedules started filling up with sitcoms, sitcoms and more sitcoms, and by 2000 reality television (Big Brother, Survivor) was added to the mix. All this meant a reduction in primetime dramatic programming, one of the traditional breeding grounds for new actors. Iconic stars like Steve McQueen, Clint Eastwood and Lee Marvin all got their starts on TV in the '50s and early '60s.

Is this trend likely to continue? Yes, but probably more slowly. Dramatic TV programming is falling off in all English-speaking countries thanks to reality television, and the mega-musical is a noxious weed infesting theatre districts all over the world. So it would seem that any rebirth of American acting talent must begin with the assassination of Simon Cowell...just kidding...I think.