Via Wired.com:
Star Wars: The Force Awakens has been a hit with audiences and is already one of the highest-grossing movies of all time. It features great visuals, snappy dialogue, and a likeable cast of young actors such as Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, and Oscar Isaac. Children’s book editor Jordan London was particularly taken with the character Rey (Ridley).
“I think Rey is fantastic,” London says in Episode 183 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “She’s everything I imagined a female Jedi to be when I was running around a forest when I was nine.”
Author Matt London enjoyed the film as well, but he’s concerned that it has fundamentally altered the nature of Star Wars.
“This movie did something to the original trilogy that can never be undone,” he says. “I think it changes the original trilogy in ways that the prequels and the Expanded Universe—as complex and controversial as they are in some ways—never did.”
In particular he’s concerned that The Force Awakens has transformed the Star Wars feature films from a unified story with a satisfying ending into just another serialized sci-fi franchise like Star Trek or the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
“Star Wars is the modern myth,” he says. “It’s the epic that you can use to teach narrative structure, because it fits it so well. And the thing that made me so mad about this movie is, how do you tell the story of Star Wars to your kids now? You say, ‘At the end all the heroes that you loved lived happily ever after … and then two hours later [they didn’t].”
But Jordan London admires the way that The Force Awakens subverts our ideas about happy endings.
“There’s definitely a trend in the stories that have been told in the last decade that take a look at villains from another perspective, or tell stories after they end,” she says. “Because life goes on and it’s not always happily ever after. And I think that says something about our society today, that we’re willing to see what happens after, and that it’s not always pretty.”
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