STAR WARS: The Force Awakens, Greatness and the Sad State of the Online Spoiler Phenomenon

By Christopher Barr │POSTED ON DECEMBER.18, 2015

There aren't any spoilers in this article.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens was an action packed, delightful entertaining film to watch.  It was all the things we wanted from a return-to-form after the disasters that was the prequels.  This film was fun, not just as a Star Wars film but as a film standing on its own, it was a blast to watch.  The trailers let us know that we were in for a fun film and we weren’t let down.

The performances in this film were great, the action sequences that director J.J Abrams created were spectacular, and the John Williams score was goose-bump worthy throughout the film.  The practical effects were a welcomed addition to the CGI over-saturation of the prequels.  The film wasn’t only a fun film but it was incredibly funny, where all the funny moments were honest and deserving of their respective moments.

J.J Abrams got it.  As a Star Wars fan himself, he got not only what George did wrong with the prequels but what George did right with the original trilogy.  He painted his canvas with the original paint that George started with but also added his own colors and his own vision to this world from this galaxy far far away.  He was able to please the older fans while simultaneously welcoming a new generation of fans.  The brilliance of what he and his colossal team of actors, set designers, special effects creators and all other collaborators have done, was to introduce this world to the little boys and little girls who haven’t seen Star Wars before, while giving their parents who saw and loved the originals the same kind of delightful enjoyment.

The Force Awakens was a viscerally emotional film from an obvious nostalgic point of view but also an even more poignant contemporary point of view.  Rey, the main character of the film is its spine, she is its heart and she journeys to find the soul that we all loved from the originals.  She bridges the old with the new in a very Homer-esque way.  Joseph Campbell certainly grounded the mythology that was allegorized for thousands of years from our own history, which heavily influenced George Lucas to do a somewhat explainable mythology he created for his Flash Gordon inspired story that become Star Wars.

The character Finn who was a Stormtrooper turned defector, for all the right reasons, was an absolute delight in the film.  As we saw from the trailers, he was no longer willing to go along with the ‘First Order’, a new evil regime after the fall of the Empire.  BB-8, the main droid in the film was adorable but not enough to be annoying.  This little spinning droid had character and soul behind that one dark shaded lense of an eye.  The Millennium Falcon is still the best hunk of junk in the galaxy.  It was great to see Han Solo back in the seat and also to see Harrison Ford enjoying playing Han Solo again.  The Dark Side’s new front overlord Kylo Ren was multilayered, he was menacing, and he was a great advisory to the heroes of the film.  Walking in the footsteps of Darth Vader’s enormous legacy, Kylo Ren didn’t disappoint.  Also they didn’t overuse characters where a lesser filmmaker would have been more tempted to do so.    

The problem with the Star Wars: The Force Awakens isn’t even in the film, it’s in the culture we all live in, this social media saturation that we all call ‘progress’.  The big reveal in The Empire Strikes Back, when Luke is told by Darth Vader that he is his father would likely have never stayed tightly sealed as it did in 1980.  Today we live in a spoiler savvy culture where nothing is sacred, were almost everything is aired on the internet.  

Why is this?  Covert introversion?  The weak hide behind the safety of their computer screens and poke digital prods at faceless people that will never see who actually poked them.  We live in a culture of passive warfare that slithers in the darkness of social streaming.  We live in a culture where we no longer have to qualify anything we have an ‘opinion’ about.  We live in a culture where we have a long reaching voice, a voice that has never been as reaching.  Some of us post pictures of cats and silly things that dogs do, some of us post opinions about political matters that many of us really are not qualified to write about, but sadly a lot of us post things that overtly are written to spoil another person’s experience.

Many movie websites discussing Star Wars: The Force Awakens have been quite vigilant about deleting comments that spoil various plot points in the film.  So now we are getting these losers commenting on topics that are not Star Wars related about Star Wars plot points just to spoil the film for people who haven’t seen it yet.  These are people sitting and saying to themselves that they know this particular plot point or exciting reveal in the film and then desire to beat the film to the punch, so to speak.  Sort of like Santa sitting around the Christmas tree and shouting out to a kid what the actual present he is about to open, but yet in this case it’s detached and removed from confrontation and accountability.

Lots of people slip up by saying that Bruce Willis is a ghost throughout The Sixth Sense, (sorry to those who haven’t seen the film but it’s been 16 years for the love of god).  Then you get those people that aren’t slipping up, they want to spoil it for the rest of us.  They want to attach their fantasy of reality to what they think reality actually is.  We live in a culture now where the fantasy world of fiction is being pulled desperately by many to our world, allowing the ignorant individual to camouflage him or herself from the actual reality of the world, the reality of the political and religious dogmatism of their country, the reality of their town or city they live in, the reality of their friends, the reality of their family and most importantly the reality of their own mind.  We live in the most distorted time for a group of people that should by all accounts be the most enlightened, given all the access we have to knowledge not only of the present but of the past.

What’s so interesting about The Force Awakens is it’s here in a time of actual global despair.  The first Star Wars film was released in 1977 during a time of despair. Both films are about the dark and the light, they are about awakening, they are about the future and saving it.  Sadly the lessons from the first films didn’t brush off as well as maybe they should have.  We are taking anonymity to the same level as we do when we play computer games.  What we destroy will reappear when we start over.  Through a McLuhan / Baudrillard Simulacra, we are hurting the world with real people in it, mistaking it for some form of delusional hyper-reality.

The question outside of the evolution of computers and postmodernism is, psychologically what are we doing when we do this, not to make light of real global issues?  We are compensating for a form of loneliness that we were born into, we are possessing our fantasies and forcing ourselves into their reality and out of our own actual reality, which is itself paradoxically its own fantasy.  

By doing this we are tethering ourselves to these fictional worlds, in this case Star Wars.  To use a fake spoiler as an example, the Terminator shows up in The Force Awakens, he is there to kill Rey because the First Order is worried about a new messianic-type leader to overthrow their plans.  This isn’t actually what happens in the film but if we wanted it to become part of the fantasy, the idea is to tell people before the film does, so that very knowledge would connect them with the film itself, via the soon-to-be memories that the moviegoer will experience.

The synergy surrounding Star Wars: The Force Awakens is monumental without a doubt, but our ability to keep these secrets to ourselves in our mass-surveilled society, with the temptation of Facebook, Instagram and Twitter’s ever flowing stream and the celebrity-driven desire for attention, in a First World plagued with over saturating posts and texts and likes and tweets and ‘how am I going to be seen in all of this glitter, how am I going to be something in this river of nonstop infotainment?’  This is what results in passive-aggressive tendencies of illuminating a sort of Bat signal on to the world of social media, for good or for bad.

Sadly the film will try to teach us a lesson that most of us will not hear through the distracted techno-linguistic vernacular of our minds.  The lesson is to be in the world, to not always dream of what we want but to actualize it.  Rey chooses to ‘be’ in the world, she decides to fight, not electronically via the safety of her place, but to get outside of her head and be in the world, where other people are.

Star Wars is a fantasy, it’s a place that we are suppose to drift away to and forget about our daily problems.  The problem here is that George Lucas never intended this franchise to be just that.  He created a philosophy, not as idealistic as Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek but one more grounded in reality, in a way Joseph Campbell would appreciate.  Star Wars isn’t about action, it’s about thinking.  The force is thought itself, sure in the films a Jedi could move objects with his mind.  The Dark Side allowed forcing strangulation, but the point here is, and what most of us should take from The Force Awakens and the originals is that (thought) + (action) results in something like Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity or (thought) + (action) may result in Hitler’s own holocaust.

George Lucas was aware of these forces in the world and likely within himself.  He would have glimpsed at his Jungian Shadow every now and then like the most of us.  The Force Awakens continues with this metaphorical battle of the minds within our very own mind.  It entertains its audience while allowing them to subtly confront their own battle, as Plato put it, while recognizing that they aren’t the only ones fighting it.