The fun comes from the action-packed plot and the great special effects. The emotion comes from the reappearance of treasured old characters and their original actors. First comes Han Solo and Chewbacca (“Chewy, we’re home”). Then Han meets his old love Princess Leiea (“Your hair is different”). Ultimately the Resistance — and we — reconnect with Luke Skywalker. The powerful Jedi is offered his old light sabre in the hope he will return from his retreat to assume the responsibilities of government. And yes, C3P0 and R2-D2 also return.
The film ends on Rey’s extending the light sabre to Luke. Does he accept it? A modest proposal: Perhaps a sequel might reveal his response?
But the core of the film rests on the growth and resourcefulness of the two unlikely heroes: the woman scavenger, Rey, and Finn, the black man of conscience who shucks his white Storm Trooper shell uniform to flee the vicious First Order. “Because it’s the right thing to do,” Finn helps the stranger Poe Dameron. Finn and Rey rise from their respective underclass. Finn knows Solo as “the Rebellion General” but to scavenger Rey he’s “The smuggler.” Each identifies with a different aspect of the hero.
That’s where we find the film’s primary reflection upon our times. Two resourceful underdogs bring new spirit and will to the side that would turn The Force back to the service of humanity — and all its mutant offshoots. It's a call to preserve civilization.
While Princess Leia rules the isolated Resistance, in hope her brother Luke will return to fulfil his destiny, the other woman, Rey, provides the real courage and technical savvy. “I’m no-one,” she identifies herself to Maz Kanata, another version of the power of woman. Phasma is the female power on the Dark side but is only a female version of the worst male values. She's more metallic than human. So asked what to do with her Han says: "Is there a garbage chute... or trash compactor?" The metaphor puts her in the material Rey dealt in before discovering her higher mission: saving humanity. Rey is utterly self-reliant. When she first connects to Finn she has to keep pushing away his helping hand; she runs ahead and ends up saving him more than he her. As she trumps even Solo, he almost offers her a job. She’s the hero of our times.
As General Drux describes his plan, the situation may reflect our global political situation. The First Order is a heartless, vicious tyranny that seeks universal rule. As Drux relishes “the end of the Republic. The end of a regime that acquiesces to disorder,” he can be read as proposing an end to the “disorder” of our freedoms. That evokes the sharia of ISIS. As the heroine is a Rey of light she is the antithesis to the radical Islamists' suppression and demeaning of woman.
To justify destroying the New Republic Drux charges it with lying to the galaxy while secretly supporting the “treachery of the rogues of the Resistance.” He sounds the ISIS charge to a global caliphate, or at least any fascist attempt at total power: “All remaining systems will bow to the First Order and will remember this as the last day of the Republic!”
Supreme Ruler Snoke is less a man than a wisp of shrivelled evil that slips in and out of materialization, less a person than a malevolent idea. ISIS fits today, as the Nazis would have 80 years ago.
In such an intergalactic plethora of humanoid forms, what god could possibly be made in man’s image. So the world of Star Wars is a world without religions. The First Order suggests an ISIS stripped of its religious pretence.
In antithesis to the Christian trinity, the new film doubles down on the father-son dynamic. This time the good father breeds a malevolent evil son. We long ago shared Luke Skywalker’s shock that monster Darth Vader was his father. Here the evil Kylo Ren is the son of Han and Leia, seduced to the Dark Side. He dedicates his command of The Force to evil. He has assumed Darth Vader’s helmet and sombre wheeze. But as he admits to Snoke, sometimes he “feels it, the call from the light.” In his showdown on the long narrow bridge with Solo he has to choose, as Snoke predicted, between his father Solo and false guide Snoke. He chooses the false father over the true, the Dark side over humanity.
When Kylo Ren removes his helmet, shows his face and seems to submit to his emotional connection to his father, we have hope. “I'm being torn apart, “ he tells his father. “I want to be free of this pain. I know what I have to do but I don't know if I have the strength to do it. Will you help me?” Of course Han promises “Anything.” That flash of human vulnerability and feeling is what Adam Driver is brilliantly cast to deliver in that moment. Our hope is dashed. Solo draws near, till Kylo Ren impales him on his light saber. Solo still caresses his son’s cheek, forgivingly, before plunging to his death.
When Kylo Ren ignominiously loses his climactic duel with Rey — not just to a woman but to a scavenger of junk — the evil empire he has served crumbles beneath him. The forces of humanity win out over the forces of night, characterized here as the dehumanized Storm Troopers and vicious Dark Side.
The West’s current confusion before the cultural onslaught by radical Islamists seems to bear out Yeats’s prophecy in “The Second Coming: (1919):
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
The new Star Wars recovers the good guys’ conviction and passionate intensity. Hence Leia’s “Hope is not lost today. It’s found.”
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