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So, now, the spoilery bits– I know I already did a review. I know. So this is more, after digesting it, me spitting back out the parts that really sparkled for me, the magic I drew from it that’s going to sustain me. And maybe I’ll address the dissonant notes, but.
In my first squee I mentioned how Rose Tico reminded me so strongly of someone I knew, and her tiny hands and her fierceness– I don’t want that to come through dismissive, or reductive, or racist (all Asians look the same is not the trope I’m going for here!). I think it’s that she’s just such a good Everyman, she really is. Because I was trying to pin it down, which leaguemate she so strongly resembled, and it really isn’t any one person.
But like. The concrete detail, there was a closeup of her hand, and she’s– Kelly Marie Tran is five feet two, and has small hands and feet befitting her stature. The shape of her hand is very typical for a woman of her size. I have long fingers, that’s not my hand shape, I’m a giant lug, but many of my friends my whole life have had little-girl hands like that. And after girls’ schools and derby and a lifetime of women-only spaces, the association I have with little girl hands like that, short fingers and short nails, too small for the default fencing foil grip, too short to play the piano but she does anyway and better than you, can use kid scissors while you’re still hunting for an adult pair, strong enough to open the jar, clever enough to thread the needle, the friend you got to finagle the broken door lock– is strength, and resourcefulness, and nimbleness, and there she is in a goddamned fantasy epic, with her stubby ponytail and practical coveralls and sweet unhesitating fierceness and ugly-cry grief that is still noble, so goddamn noble and powerful. And her little hand, close up, wrapped around that piece of jewelry that is also a practical tool, and she is resolute and she is brave and she gets to be a hero. That’s who our Everyman is for this movie: a girl who looks like someone you probably know and have probably needed to ask for help opening a jar because she definitely knows how to do the whack-it-on-the-counter trick, she’s got the knack of all the tricks because she’s spent her whole life getting by in a world sized for someone slightly larger than she’ll ever be, but of course she’s enough, thanks, don’t be silly.
Another concrete detail of hands was the scene where Leia and Vice-Admiral Holdo hold hands for a moment. There’s a close-up, of their hands, and they’re both– old-lady hands. Carrie Fisher’s fingers were quite thickened with age, I don’t know if she had arthritis but her hands had certainly undergone a lot of changes. Laura Dern’s hands, I’d recently paid attention to because of the fabulous manicures her character Diane sported in Twin Peaks; her fingers are still long and graceful, she’s a tall woman with long digits, but they’re also clearly the hands of a woman of 50, with corrugations around the knuckles and thinned skin, the tendons stand out on the backs, they’re not young woman hands.
And there are their hands, old women’s hands, and these two old women are friends and comrades and admire one another, and they’re senior military officers, and they get to have that moment. But that was just a moment, for me, of recognizing the sheer physical reality of those characters– their hands.
When’s the last time you saw old women’s hands doing anything onscreen that wasn’t, maybe, knitting? (Not that there’s anything wrong with knitting, but.)
In Rogue One I burst into tears when I saw how many women were in the cockpits of the fighters. I didn’t have time for that in this movie, because so many of the faces we saw in cockpits were women, were people of color. I actually noticed the scene with the ground troops, where they were in the trench on the mineral planet– those were all white dudes, and that was odd. (Though, one was old, the grey-bearded guy who stepped out on the plain and made the red footprint, so I guess age diversity is what we got there.) One or two of them might have been men of color, it was hard to say. But no women, there.
No, I don’t have it in me to fuss a whole lot at the dissonant notes. The battle scenes made no fucking sense, and since Poe’s involvement in this film was almost all battle-tactics-related, his entire involvement in the movie was irrational yelling. Why would you run a military organization like that? Why is everything secret? Why wouldn’t you just fucking tell people what was going on? Why would you apparently not have a plan to protect your bombers from enemy fighters, if you’d gone so far as to have someone take out the onboard defenses of your target?
Well, movie, is the answer. They never address shit like that in movies. Everything’s for Dramatic Tension. There are never really realistic battle plans or sensible tactics and nobody ever actually behaves the way a commander ought to.
It sucks, because Poe’s my favorite, but let’s be real, nobody can write fucking battle scenes.
The mitigating factor of how shitty Poe acted was that 90% of the lower officers all went with him instantly. If Holdo really thought he was such a loose cannon why didn’t she fucking manage that. Clearly he’s extremely popular and a ton of your staff is just as loyal to him as to the organization. Like, no fucking shit you guys, you can’t tell him to go away. Obviously these people are loyal to him for a fucking reason and it’s not that his hair is so good. Which, I mean, it is, but. Good hair is always a shorthand for something, in Holywood.
The one thing I’d gotten spoiled for in a no-cut post was someone complaining that Holdo and Leia had smugly objectified Poe, after he rebelled, saying they still liked him because he was decorative. I was delighted to discover, upon watching the movie, that that wasn’t at all what happened. Given that the man just led a mutiny and was unquestioningly assisted by basically all of the lower-ranked officers, it was a moment of pretty straightforwardly acknowledging that this guy was good and despite having aimed that effort against you, still undeniably worth keeping around. It absolutely lines up with Oscar Isaac’s own observation that he got such a good mother-mentor vibe off Leia in this movie, and if you squint around the nonsense, that was Poe’s arc, learning hard lessons from these two senior women who’ve lived through so much and have such a wider perspective.
It was clumsily-written, but that was absolutely the dynamic of it.
(I mean, I get that people are going to extrapolate what they want from this, that’s what my entire essay was about just now, but I don’t get the point of extrapolating shit you strenuously object to.)
Have I mentioned the three-quarters of the movie that wasn’t the Resistance? Rey and Luke and Kylo and Hux and Phasma and such? No I haven’t. I actually had nothing at all to complain about with Rey and Luke, I was deeply satisfied with their characterization and development.
I have suffered, as an epic fic writer, from something I recognize in these characters: when you set up a mystery, a plot point that goes forward unresolved, people get really invested in the solution to the mystery and they start guessing, and they come up with theories, and they get really super into it. And as the author, that sometimes makes me super nervous, because I hadn’t– I mean, it’s supposed to be a mystery, you’re meant to wonder, but– God, the answer’s actually pretty simple, it’s actually just a plot point, the whole thing doesn’t really hinge on it like that, oh gosh. If it’s just a misunderstanding, or something two characters saw in different ways, then I wind up incredibly worried that it won’t be enough for the audience. Believe me– I just wound up a 200k series and a plot point I’d hung out in the first chapter got wound up in a “character A told B something B didn’t remember” misunderstanding, and I felt like a total dick because really? that’s it? it’s been two years and– that’s it?
Fortunately no readers have been mean to me about it. Because– yeah, that’s all it was, and I’d set it up that way from the beginning because I’ve had that sort of thing in my life, and it seemed realistic, and I didn’t really think about– 200k+ words and two years and– well, that’s it, though. That’s all I got. It’s– that has to be enough because that’s what it is. More won’t fit into the story, and would undo what I’d actually been trying to set up with this.
I love Rey, but I don’t need to write all that much about it because I found it so satisfying as it was written.
But, I guess, circling back to the concrete physical imagery– we get to have that, now, the image of her skinny strong woman body, wiry and strong and fast, absolutely beating the shit out of Luke Skywalker in a fair fucking fight, and holding her own in a melee against those scary red things, and realistically, absolutely realistically, beating the shit out of Kylo fucking Ren. I love them as a battle pair, I love Driver’s physical acting, he’s so powerful and huge and lanky and just a bit clumsy, and Ridley is so wiry and strong and I’ve skated with a bunch of girls like her, watch WFTDA Champs footage for a dozen examples of bodies her size and shape, those are the university softball-jock champions who can fucking jump over you and have abs made out of titanium springs, your only hope as a 215-pound blocker is to just put your entire ass in her way because she can’t go through you, but you are grimly aware that she can absolutely go over you if she has enough of a running start so your entire focus has to be denying her a running start for as many seconds as you can buy for your teammates.
Anyway– I have zero problem believing someone shaped like that would absolutely wreck a whole bunch of big dudes in a laser sword fight.
I guess the overarching theme of this is female physicality. I enjoyed the female physicality of this movie, above all else.
Oh and BB-8. I have had more than one person tell me that the BB-8 in this movie very much felt like one I’d written. He’s a little more madcap than mine, but the frenzy and swearing was definitely how I’d envisioned em. And Poe pets him like a puppy, and that’s all I really needed. Thanks y’all.
Happy beeps, buddy. Happy beeps.
(yeah except that in my writing the droids don’t audibly beep when they’re in the astromech cockpit because they’re in vacuum so there’d be no sound so they have a text interface which I really thought I’d gotten from canon but I can see how in a movie you wouldn’t really have a good visual shorthand way of doing that so of course you make em beep in the movie)
(oh one last thing I loved, which I already mentioned, was the silent explosion of the Resistance cruiser hitting the FO ship, that was so stunning, and I thought they might go whole-hog and have it really soundless because space? but having it speed of sound slower than speed of light worked fine too, even if that makes no sense.)
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