J.J. Abrams On The Force Awakens And A New Hope Similarities

J.J. Abrams discussed why The Force Awakens was made to be so similar to A New Hope at the Tribeca Film Festival.

In an interview with Chris Rock, director J.J. Abrams acknowledged the obvious similarities between his film, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and the first Star Wars movie ever made, A New Hope (via /Film).

"“[‘The Force Awakens’] was a bridge and a kind of reminder; the audience needed to be reminded what ‘Star Wars’ is, but it needed to be established with something familiar, with a sense of where we are going to new lands, which is very much what 8 and 9 do. The weird thing about that movie is that it had been so long since the last one. Obviously the prequels had existed in between and we wanted to, sort of, reclaim the story. So we very consciously — and I know it is derided for this — we very consciously tried to borrow familiar beats so the rest of the movie could hang on something that we knew was ‘Star Wars.’”"

The reason is one we had surmised: The Force Awakens was meant to bring the fans of the original trilogy who didn’t like the prequels back on the Star Wars bandwagon.

Abrams also noted that the new characters needed a familiar space in which to ground them for both old and fresh audiences.

"“All the characters – the Stormtrooper who turns, Finn played by John Boyega, and Rey, the character that Daisy plays, the Scavenger, Kylo Ren, the son of Han and Leia, and Poe the pilot – all these were characters and sort of their roles in the story needed to exist in something that predates them.”"

My problem with this reasoning is that in creating callbacks to A New Hope, J.J. Abrams and Lawrence Kasdan used elements that were so like the originals, they may as well have gone all the way and made them the same. For example, /Film writer Ethan Anderton mentions in his article reporting J.J.’s statement, that the reason Jakku was so like Tatooine was so it would be familiar. If that’s the case, why not just make it Tatooine? Having it be Tatooine would merely be a continuation of the mythology surrounding heroes who come from that planet. Turning it into an entirely new planet, yet make it look the same and be populated with the same type of denizens, seems superfluous.

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Starkiller Base is another aspect of The Force Awakens‘s mirror image of A New Hope that bothers me, but in a different way. In The Phantom Menace, there wasn’t a Death Star, there was a droid control ship, and it wasn’t a driving plot point until the end of the film; the element of destroying a super structure in space remains, but it’s different in a fundamental way. Starkiller Base, on the other hand, is basically the Death Star 3.0, and it’s destroyed in almost the exact same way and prefaced by the exact same type of group planning as A New Hope and Return of the Jedi combined.

I’m not trying to be nitpickey. But my biggest criticism of The Force Awakens is, aside from the characters, nothing really new was added to the saga storyline. The ending is the freshest part of the overall story, with Rey going to give Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber back to him on the top of the island where he’s isolated himself. That’s appropriate because as a lead-in to Episode VIII, which promises to be weird and different. But many of the larger set pieces of the film more or less repeats what happened in A New Hope and Return of the Jedi in almost exactly the same way. Not that The Force Awakens is not good or enjoyable, but for me it felt short in the respect of creating a completely unique space for the sequel trilogy. That fresh take is what I hope Rian Johnson will produce in Episode VIII.

Next: J.J. Abrams Clarifies His Statement Regarding Rey's Parents

What do you think? Do you think The Force Awakens is too similar to the original trilogy, or did it have just the right amount of nostalgia? Let us know in the comments.