Three Things "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" says about the 21st century

SPOILER-alert: Do not read this if you have not watched the The Force Awakens

Star Wars The Force Awakens is the ultimate 21st century movie – impatient, expecting immediate reward, lacking reflection. And it shows in big and small ways. Don't get me wrong, I liked this movie. If anything, this critique is less about the movie itself than about movies have changed in general and what that says about us. Because after all, movie execs, producers and directors are smart (and they're even smarter at Disney) – they will give the people what they want. Mapping the new Star Wars against its older self allows us to discover things that are awkward, because they are addressing an audience raised in a fundamentally different social discourse. Here are three things I learned about us while watching the movie.

Image credits: Inkredo Designer, unsplash.com

1. Space is negated as a factor

Like in Star Wars, JJ Abrams ignores one of the fundamental concepts of science fiction – space – in order to speed up the plot. We already saw long-distanced beaming between two planets or onto a ship at warp speed in his two Star Trek remake. The new Star Wars flick allows for a super-deathstar-like raygun that obliterates planets light years away. The Resistance is able to monitor the happenings on Starkiller Base, even though they are not in the same solar system. X-Wing pilots communicate with each other while in hyperspace. Yes, and speaking of hyperspace, Han Solo – who in Episode IV stresses how complicated hyperdrive calculations are to ensure you don't end up in a black hole, can suddenly jump to lightspeed from within a ship – and out of lightspeed right on a planet's surface. What sounds like a nerdy rant actually shows significantly how our thinking around everyday technology is changing the plotmaking in science fiction. Like the internet and mobile phones, technology is expected to deliver immediately and make us available all the time. As you can set up a teleconference between Dubai, Sydney and London, so goes instant intergalactic communication between planets. As the last sanctuary – mobile telephony on planes – is beginning to fall, so does the mystique of hyperspace. As we get used to conducting war through drones in far distant places, so does Starkiller Base's reach expand to cover the entire universe. This effectively makes for an end to space as a plot mechanism. Sure, you still have different locations – but they are no longer separated by meaningful travel. Remember the scene where Ben puts the visor on Luke and tells him to use his powers to fight an exercise drone with the blast shield down on the Falcon? That scene happens during travel, it is typical of the inner reflection that happens when you are between places. Remember all the reflective scenes in Star Trek – Kirk, Spock, McCoy reminiscing about the meaning of their mission. Again, a lot of that happens during travel. Modern blockbuster sci-fi has no time for this, like easyjet-hopping tourists, the protagonists need to experience location after location, without respecting the distance between them.
 

2. Rey, the Force and the absence of Failure

When we meet Rey, she knows nothing of the Force and has never flown a starship. When we are done with the movie, she's learned how to fly the Falcon as good as Han Solo, beaten the bad guy with a lightsaber and mastered the Jedi-mind trick. It took Luke three movies to get there, to first learn about the force, try and try and try to move objects, first loosing against Darth Vader until after finally having found himself, conquering evil. Oversight? Not really. Rather it is typical of today's idea about education, which is all about achievement and not about developing character. Rey is like the wonderchild every modern parent seems to have who, if you just put her into the right environment, will flourish and accomplish things. And her development is like a Facebook or Twitter-feed – full of achievements, devoid of struggle and hardship. Setbacks and failure are part of the learning process – we all know this – but the face of development today only shows the positives. Luke's training was only superficially about skills – it was about making moral choices, learning to be humble, making mistakes in order to learn from them. In today's sped up world, driven by rational functionality, that kind of development is no longer a priority.

Image credits: Ali Yasar Isgoren, unsplash.com

3. Things seem to happen randomly

The movie is full of coincidences that are just taken for granted and are simply there for the convenience of not having to tell the story. Rey and Finn just happen to find the Falcon lying around, Anakin's/Luke's lightsaber is just lying around to be found, Captain Phasma just happens to be walking along to be captured and threatened into lowering Starkiller Base's shields (really?), Chewie and Hand just happen to have brought explosives with them just in case there's no better plan to destroy the superweapon, R2-D2 just happens to wake up at the end of the movie to provide a conclusion to the puzzle of finding Luke. One of these things alone could be a deus ex machine moment (like the Eagles suddenly turning up in Lord of the Rings). But all together make for lazy non-storytelling. Here is another 21st century phenomenon. While we are all connected with each other electronically, the world moves so fast that most of us are having trouble making sense of it all. We no longer see a lot of connections between events, they just seem to happen, one thing throwing us off course after another – terrorist bombings, financial crises, health scares, etc. Having seemingly random things thrown around us seems normal. The analysis of cause-and-effect in society has become the domain of speculation (might be, could be) or conspiracy theories – and in just the same way Star Wars fans will set up their own theories (why was the Falcon there, why the lightsaber, why did R2-D2 awake at exactly that moment) rather than having a linear cause-and-effect explanation.