The Force Awakens’ Still Holds Up 10 Years Later

It’s hard to imagine that it has been ten years for the reason that Star Wars sequel trilogy kicked off with 2015’s The Force Awakens. It implies that 11-year-olds who were sitting within the theater, likely watching a Star Wars film for the primary time, at the moment are 21.

Although there was lots of criticism that The Force Awakens was too just like A Recent Hope, the 2015 film was a juggernaut on the box office and created an internet frenzy as everyone debated Rey’s origins and the mystery surrounding Luke’s disappearance.

Unfortunately, things took a little bit of a tumble with 2017’s The Last Jedi. Rian Johnson took an ambitious swing by specializing in the Force connection between Rey (Daisy Ridley) and Kylo Ren (Adam Driver), delegating former Stormtrooper Finn (John Boyega) and Resistance pilot Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac) to minor subplots that hardly served the story.

Although Johnson seemingly arrange Kylo Ren to grow to be the villain in the ultimate installment of the trilogy, Emperor Palpatine’s surprise return completely walked back Ren’s descent to the dark side. After a confrontation with Rey, he returned because the redeemed Ben Solo to tackle Palpatine. He passed away at the top of the film, using the last of his power to resurrect Rey, and seemingly faded into the Force.

Unfortunately, because the only son of Han Solo and Leia Organa, this meant that the Solo/Skywalker bloodline has seemingly disappeared. Although Rey was revealed to be born from a clone of Emperor Palpatine, she uses the name “Rey Skywalker” at the top of the film, stirring more controversy amongst fans.

But this is not about The Rise of Skywalker, which was actually the very last Star Wars film to seem in theaters way back in 2019. On the tenth anniversary of The Force Awakens, fans had one thing on their minds: hope.

Throughout the six-year run of the prequel trilogy, fans highlighted a fair proportion of disappointment and controversy. Whether it was Jar Jar Binks and a study of how high taxes and unchecked corporate power led to the Galactic Empire in The Phantom Menace, to the melodramatic lines and unpolished CGI sequences panned within the seven years following Revenge of the Sith, there have been many missteps fans hoped to forget.

Fans were feeling hopeful concerning the way forward for the franchise when Disney bought Lucasfilm in 2012, and the announcement of the sequel trilogy had them wanting to see more Star Wars on the massive screen and see what happened to Luke, Leia, and Han after the Battle of Endor. Unfortunately, the sequel trilogy ultimately fell flat resulting from the shortage of a cohesive vision and absolutely no outline for where the story would go after three movies.

That being said, The Force Awakens began off strong. John Williams’ iconic rating and the parallel beats of A Recent Hope actually helped the story feel like Star Wars, while introducing a brand new generation to a brand new band of heroes to root for. The characters are interesting enough, and Oscar Isaac’s Poe does an awesome job bringing the humor early on to balance out the undeniable fact that the sequel trilogy principally opened with a massacre. It’s not overly violent, though, and is actually more interesting than starting a movie with a debate about trade policy.

Finn later frees Poe from the First Order, and so they crash on Jakku. It’s here that Finn runs into Rey, and the story really begins. Although Finn and Rey spend a good period of time together, Rey never meets Poe until the very end of the film, and even then, it’s just a fast introduction. Fans hoping for a brand new “trio” were quickly dissatisfied, as Rey heads off to seek out Luke and they are not united again until the top of The Last Jedi. It makes their scenes together in the ultimate film feel more forced than earned, because the audience barely had any time to see their chemistry develop on-screen.

John Boyega gets plenty to do in the primary film, where he even wields a lightsaber against Kylo Ren. While it could have been poetic to see a former Stormtrooper grow to be a Jedi to take down the First Order, Rian Johnson relegated Finn to a side character, and his Force sensitivity was treated as a running joke that never landed the punchline in the ultimate film.

Likewise, Kylo Ren makes a superb villain, if that is what he’s speculated to be. It might need been more dramatic if he hadn’t shown his face so early on within the trilogy, as it could have allowed the story to play with the mystery of his origins a bit longer.

Still, The Force Awakens did give fans plenty to discuss, and although most weren’t comfortable with the direction that the trilogy took, it did introduce a brand new generation to a forged of interesting characters that would have told a really compelling story with a unified narrative vision.

Now, ten years later, it’s clear that the film arrange the best mixture of hope, humor, and motion that fans have come to expect from a Star Wars movie. Taken by itself, it continues to be a great film… so long as you do not focus an excessive amount of on how the trilogy ends.