The Force Awakens: Millennials’ Hopeful Star Wars Redemption

Article by Zachary Evans

I can’t remember a time in my life that Star Wars was not a part of. As a child, I would endlessly watch my family’s VHS copies of the original trilogy that my parents recorded off TV and would frequently have lightsaber fights with my brother using sticks outside. Seeing the theatrical rerelease of the original trilogy for the Special Edition in 1997 are some of my earliest memories of going to a movie theater.

When the prequel trilogy came, I was immensely excited. This was going to be the Star Wars that I could call my own—one that I would get to experience just like my parents did with the original trilogy. However, this did not really end up being the case, and the prequel trilogy was not just a disappointment for me and other Star Wars fans in my generation, it was a painful loss of innocence around something that was very important to us.

The imminent release of The Force Awakens is a huge deal culturally across the board, and is set to break every conceivable box office record. Considering how dominant Star Wars is in terms of popularity, this shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone. For my generation, however, it carries an even bigger weight. My generation is old enough to remember the excitement leading up to The Phantom Menace, and the subsequent disappointment over the prequel trilogy in general. While older generations had the magical experience of seeing the original films on the big screen, the closest we came to that was the 1997 theatrical release of the special edition, which had its own share of disappointments for fans.

This is why The Force Awakens is not only exciting because, well, it’s Star Wars, it is also because it has the potential to serve as redemption for fans who haven’t gotten to partake in a good Star Wars movie release. We haven’t had the same opportunity to have our minds blown the way audiences were when the first movie opened in 1977. Just like the heavily CGI sets and effects of the prequel trilogy, our Star Wars experience felt artificial, like an imitation.

We were promised exciting new things, but all of these were at the expense of what continues to draw people to Star Wars. In the end, it is not lightsabers or explosions that made the original films so engaging. If it was, then the prequel films would have been incredibly well-loved, seeing as they upped the ante on these aspects in huge ways. In Episode II, we get to see more lightsabers in action than the rest of the films combined, but it is absolutely the worst movie in the entire franchise.

Finding redemption for Star Wars is especially important to my generation because the major issues with the prequels are all things that are frequently used to go after younger audiences, which we fell into when Episode I came out. At nine-years-old, I loved Episode I, and so did all of my friends. However, even then, the things I was most drawn to were those that most closely resembled the original trilogy and I thought Jar Jar Binks was really lame.

The crescendo of Episode I was especially something that I was drawn to, which makes sense considering it is not only reminiscent of familiar Star Wars territory, it is actually structured in the same way as that of Return of the Jedi (a four-pronged fight with a space battle, lightsaber fight, ground war between the antagonist forces and the native people of the planet, and the infiltration of an opposing stronghold).

Unfortunately, as the other two prequel films came out, it was clear that this kind of homage was not something we would see continue. Instead, Episodes II and III seemed to be entirely made up of new ways to disregard the best parts of the original trilogy while making obvious winks as fan service. Even recurring elements from the original trilogy, like epic space battles, felt strange and manufactured. Everything was shiny and CGI, but this was a poor replacement for the realism of the practical effects in the original trilogy. This is why I get excited to see things like air battles in trailers that resemble ones of our world more than purely science fiction.

This kind of pandering is a huge part of why The Force Awakens has this extra weight added to it for my generation of fan.  It’s not just that George Lucas made some terrible decisions when making the prequels, it’s that these mistakes were widely considered to be things that people my age would grab onto. At times, I have felt a strange level of guilt over this.

Am I somehow responsible for practical effects and a simple, but compelling story arc being replaced by terrible CGI and lengthy plot devices that are only thrown in to add action scenes (looking at you, podracing)?

Was my childhood innocence to blame for Jar Jar Binks?

I know that this weird guilt is completely misplaced, and that George Lucas is the one who made these decisions. However, these feelings only serve as yet another reason that I, and so many other people my age, are counting down the days until December 17th with terrified excitement. For us, who are old enough to have felt the anticipation once before, only to have our fandom’s innocence dissolve as our own did, but not old enough to have experienced better days, Star Wars needs redemption.

Our fandom had its hand cut off by our father, George Lucas, and now we can only hope that The Force Awakens is the bionic replacement we need.