I think Ezra’s right about the commercial mechanics of comic book movies (though I think this is partly due to origin stories being the only filmable comic book stories). But this is not what the new Star Wars movie is doing. Or I hope it’s not.
Retelling a story is one thing, but quoting it is another. The Force Awakens isn’t taking the timbers of the original franchise and building a new house around them. It’s self-consciously constructing a scale model.
There are two ways to interpret this choice. One is that Disney has cynically decided that the things that fans love and will pay for are incredibly specific moments: lightsabers Force-flying out of snowbanks, father-son showdowns on perilous catwalk bridges, precision bombing runs to disable shield generators. The evidence for this perspective is the numerous otherwise-pointless fanservice notes that movie invokes (the holographic chess game on the Millennium Falcon comes to mind) and the colossal amounts of money at stake.
The other interpretation is that the series’ new architects are reestablishing the franchise’s structure, rebuilding a framework badly damaged by the careless renovations in the prequels. The only creative advantage to having such structures — cumbersome, constraining sets of rules and obligations — is that you can subvert them. The evidence for this is pretty thin, and basically boils down to JJ Abrams not being a hack and everyone involved being smart and rich enough to want to play the long game.
Wishful thinking means I’m leaning toward the second option, hoping for a Rey dark side turn and subversion of the franchise’s focus on a small royal family by making Finn the new trilogy’s (Force-less) hero. But who knows. As Yglesias says, we won’t know if this new movie was good or bad for some time. Sure was fun, though.
