This week’s
Hit Me With Your Best Shot takes Star Wars: The Force Awakens as its object of
study and I must confess this was an assignment I was dreading. This is a film
everyone has written about in the past six months, either to praise it, analyze
it, deconstruct it, and decry it as a senseless failure of cinema or a new
blockbuster masterpiece. Even I have written extensively about it, with a
review, several articles about its costumes and, of course, my coverage of its
Oscar nominations. In summary, I do believe have nothing new to say about this
particular work, and for that I beg the reader’s patience and forgiveness.
Actually,
not quite. You see, upon reading that Nathaniel was thinking of featuring in
this series the latest entry in the most popular space soap opera of modern
cinema, I immediately though of choosing a shot from what to me was the film’s
most visually impactful sequence, the light saber battle during a snowstorm
that marks the climax of the film. But such ideas became completely redundant
upon reading Daniel Walber’s magnificent article about the set design featured in
the sequence in question (go read it).
I still
love that scene, especially its visceral quality, the way in which the heat of
the blades visibly contrasts with the iciness of the landscape and the
exhaustion that transpires from the bodies in conflict. But considering most of
what I what to say about it was already so elegantly verbalized I decided to
focus my attention elsewhere: the very beginning of the film.
Best Shot
From a
scene of volatile colorful light and sinewy anguished humans, we arrive at a space
tableau so stark it’s almost monochrome minimalism. A planet stands in the
middle of the empty darkness of space. It’s reflected light and natural
spherical shape are quickly violated when an alien silhouette cuts through the
image, seeming to plunge the audience into a blackness even more consuming than
that of the airless void of space.
It’s an
image of such simple symbolism than one can almost call it infantile. Good versus
evil, natural world versus militaristic artifice, roundness versus sharp
angular lines, light versus shadow. Such dichotomies are simplistic, sure, but
they’re also at the core of Star Wars, which has always been much more a
romantic fantasy than any kind of cerebral sci-fi opera (I’m ignoring Lucas’
intentions regarding the prequels, as its the convention for sane people).
Look at the
first film in the saga, for example, where the separation between what is good
and what is evil can be almost solely deduced by who dresses in white and cream
colored clothing and who dresses in rigid, black and grey costumes. The Force
Awakens doesn’t just borrow narrative structure and plot points from the
previous films, but also the back bone of its visual discourse. Though, unlike the
much criticized nostalgia infused screenplay, the visuals do this in a much
more elegant manner, while still creating a world of blatantly delineated dichotomies.
Here that dichotomy
is presented in perhaps its most visually synthetized manner and it serves as a
brilliant and starkly simple reintroduction to this world and prelude to a new
adventure. It may be a bit too self-consciously composed and created as a
visual statement for the beginning of the film, but it’s undeniably powerful
and beautiful. In one gargantuan broad stroke the filmmakers have presented the
world of their story and the conflict that propels it; while, at the same time,
finding grandiosity and monumental scale in an image that could be described
simply as a black triangle covering a white circle.
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Bonus shot
(or the actual best shot of the film, for mostly extracurricular reasons):
Is this the
face that launched a thousand slash fanfics and set ablaze the hearts (and
other bits) of many besotted moviegoers? Well, obviously, just look at him.
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