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I know everyone is sick of The Force Awakens already, but if you have any interest left, the good news is that screenwriter Todd Alcott has returned to his blog to examine the character arcs of this movie, starting with Rey. And yeah, can’t wait for Kylo Ren.

The major characters in The Force Awakens, like the movie itself, are united in their desire to measure up to their forebears. Everyone in the movie says to him or her self, “You can do this, you can do this.” Like children playing dress-up, they each worry that someone is going to point at them and laugh. Anti-hero Kylo Ren has designed a badass outfit to remind people of his grandfather Darth Vader, General Hux puts on an all-black uniform to make him look like the leader he’s much too young to be, Finn takes off his ill-fitting Stormtrooper uniform and puts on the jacket of the much cooler Poe Dameron, and Rey, literally, dwells in the shadow of the original trilogy, scavenging — like the movie — parts from the ruins of the gigantic machines that fell out of the sky.



Todd is a past contributor to the Beat with some exemplary story analyses of various superhero movies; if you remember those you’ll hurry right over to his blog.

3 COMMENTS

  1. What a metaphor for the movie. Desperate to be all that the original Star Wars was, they make a movie just like it. It’s like finding out your kids look like you…

  2. As someone who saw the first SW in 1977, this movie made me feel old. Seeing those characters as senior citizens made me aware of the passage of time. I remember when they were so young! (The last scene really choked me up.)

  3. George,

    I was telling some friends of mine that The Force Awakens is basically the Before Midnight of blockbusters, given how the original trilogy and this one have all basically aged in real time, more or less.

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