MEGAN MCARDLE: ‘The Force Awakens’ Has a Perfection Problem.
Like pretty much all of the rest of you, my family saw “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” over Christmas week. I emerged from the screening into a lively Internet debate over whether Rey, the main hero, was or was not a “Mary Sue”: an author’s wish-fulfillment character, perfect in every way, beloved by children, dogs and everyone around her. Plotwise, this character is improbably central to everything — the bride at every wedding, the corpse at every funeral. . . .
The answer is that of course Rey is a Mary Sue, though not in this case for the author; she is a stand-in for every 10-year-old who imagined themselves into the Star Wars universe, and particularly the women who wanted to be Luke, not Princess Leia. J.J. Abrams has taken all the skills of the main characters of the first “Star Wars” cast and rolled them into one: She is a pilot as good as Han Solo, also a mechanic; she is apparently fluent in multiple languages; she is a terrific hand-to-hand fighter, a good shot and, oh, she knows how to use a lightsaber the first time she picks one up. Also, mid-movie, she discovers that she can do Jedi mind tricks without having any reason to know that they even exist — apparently not content to make her Luke, Abrams also had to make her her own Obi-Wan Kenobi.
What Abrams left out is twofold: first, the sense that these are skills that have to be trained and developed, not simply inborn traits one has, like blue eyes. Second, and more important, he’s omitted the weaknesses that made the original characters so appealing: the genuine streak of nasty self-interest in Han Solo, Leia’s bullheaded arrogance, Kenobi’s wistful sense of being past his prime, Luke’s needy, whining sense of entitlement to greater things than he has gotten from the universe so true to actual teenage boys. . . .
I also tend to believe that this undercuts the longevity of the films. Kids will like it, because kids love action-packed CGI stuff. But how many people who watched this movie as a kid will keep coming back to it as an adult, the way my generation has with the original? The movie is fine for what it is, but what it is is, as my friend Terry Teachout noted, “an homage to an homage,” missing much of the charm that made the original so enduring. If the three prequels had not been so downright terrible, people would be being much harder on “The Force Awakens.” The fawning critical reaction is mostly just a vast outpouring of relief that George Lucas hasn’t been allowed to inflict more damage on his own creation.
Well, that’s a relief.