Why we shouldn't bank on Nostaligia to "save" Star Wars

“And I think if anyone can pull [Star Wars] out of the mire, it’s J.J. He’ll bring the fun back. Lucas seemed to misread what made the first ones great, and concentrate on things that people didn’t really care about, or wilfully ignore the things that people cared about. Whereas J.J. will embrace them all. “We’re going to see the Millennium Falcon again. We’re going to see those characters again. All the things that we loved about the first three, we will see again."
-Simon Pegg

 
A common theme with the hype for Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens, at least in the minds of some trilogy fans such as Simon Pegg(evident in the quote above), is that nostalgia would be enough to "save" Star Wars as a franchise and restore it's greatness after the perceived disappointment of George Lucas' Prequel Trilogy.  On the other side of the spectrum however, are the Saga fans, or those who view all six Star Wars movies as equally good, or at the very least hold no ill will towards the Prequels.  Part of the reasoning driving the latter group is the the belief that the Originals were poorly received by mainstream critics when they came out and only build up the praise because of nostalgia from the generation that grew up with them; a fact the Saga fans hope to repeat with the Prequels.  And that regardless of the Prequels faults, they at least tried to expand into new territory instead of rehashing and appealing to nostalgia.

Yet JJ Abrams, when producing Star Wars Episode VII has implied a return to nostalgia over breaking new ground despite the wishes of the Saga fans.  This raises the question of whether nostalgia is "enough" to restore Star Wars to it's former glory, a question that trilogy fans have .  Yet when looking at how this appeal to nostalgia is applied in various  long-running series, it seems that evidence has demonstrated that this has often not been the case, but have often resulted in terrible choices resulting in the destruction of plot points and character development.

This was relevant with the release of Terminator Genisys.  For months leading up to the release we were told that they would not be going back to the critically panned Terminator Salvation, that it was a reboot so we could go back to the glory days of Terminator 1 and 2, before the controversial 3rd movie and the derided 4th movie.  It will be nostalgic, lines and scenes from when the films were good will be reintroduced to a new audience.  And guess what? James Cameron supports the movie as well.

The results however, did not paint a pretty picture.  The movie, when it was released, ended up bombing in the box office and ending up with a score of 27% on Rotten Tomatoes.  This somehow allowed it to be seen in an even worse light than Terminator Salvation on both Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes.  Critics lambasted the excessive use of nostalgia, saying the only performance that was worth watching was Arnold as the heroic T-800; the character himself being reduced to comic relief as the plot focuses more on Sarah and Kyle, with criticisms directed torwards the acting of Jai Courtney.  Scenes were literally recycled shot-for-shot and so were quotes such as "come with me if you want to live".  It ended up being at best, the "Greatest Hits of Terminator and Judgement Day" that is only marginally better than Terminator Salvation.  But at worst, it ended up being the worst Terminator film thus far.   

The lesson from Terminator Genysis seems that to simply appeal to nostalia is not enough to save a franchise no matter what the disappointments are.  This has been seen in many other franchises, where the attempt to reverse what is seen as "bad" by "old-school" fans simply by reverting to what made a franchise good in the first place has led to disasterous results.  The discontent of older How I Met Your Mother fans to the "everything in common"(which would be unconventional in television due to the frequency of "opposites attract" stories) couples of Barney and Robin and Ted and Tracy(AKA the mother) together in favor of the more "traditional" "opposites attracts" and "nice guy wins" couple of Ted and Robin led to Craig Thomas and the rest of the staff to cave in to their demands to "preserve" the original version of the story by divorcing Barney and Robin and killing off the mother.  This was despite Carter Bays gradually supporting an alternate ending and newer fans being wholly supportive of Robin with Barney instead of Ted.

Likewise in Spider-Man: One More Day, Peter Parker makes a deal with Mephisto--a literal deal with the devil--to save Aunt May from a fatal gunshot wound, the sacrifice of which is the end of his marriage with Mary Jane.  The origin of this story was a reaction by older fans and editors against the character of Mary Jane Watson after her marriage to Peter Parker, because they liked Peter Parker to have the life of a "loser" outside the mask, and wanted Peter to perpetually be unable to move on from Gwen Stacy's death.  In both cases, the resolution was poorly received outside an vocal audience that turned out to be an vocal minority, leaving an sour taste in the mouths of others.

While these issues dealt with shipping and how relationships are depicted in fiction; as a gamer, I could also relate to the failure of nostaligia because that is what turned me off the storyline of World of Warcraft.  The failure of the older fanbase and the fans of Thrall as the Warchief of the Orcs to understand the character of Garrosh led to his character assassination in Mists of Pandaria, turning an arguably morally grey character into a full-on villain bent on total conquest in all of a sudden(even worse is that they could have gradually have developed him into a villain over a sudden snap).  Yet this actually turned off many of these older fans because of how badly executed the plot was(almost everyone on Garrosh's side, even formerly morally ambiguous characters and sympathetic antagonists, were turned into an insane villain overnight, despite the fact that their characterization trajectory would have had them ideally defect from Garrosh as his reign became more tyrannical or also undergo a slow and gradual fall from grace).  And this did little to save WoW's stagnating player base, with a population have declined to 7 million as of 2015, a fary cry from the 11-12 million it had in it's heyday.

Thus it seems that those who do not learn from history will be doomed to repeat it, and this fate will hold true for the Force Awakens if it has nothing else than nostalgia of the Original Trilogy.  Simply appealing to nostalgia and throwing back to the "glory days" is not enough to save a movie.  It isn't simply enough to see the Millennium Falcon and Neo-Stormtroopers again or Han and Chewie appear in one scene, or Ackbar shouting how the Rebels(or in this context, the Resistance) has fallen into a trap by the Empire(in this context, the First Order/Imperial Remnant).  The movie has to have original substance and it has to have proper execution.  And without it, instead of being the biggest vindication of a fandom, or a subsection in a fandom, it will be the biggest disappointment since the Phantom Menace in the eyes of the trilogy fans.     

So What Should be Done?

If it is clear simply appealing to nostaligia is not a viable or sustainable tactic, what should be done.  In that case we should maybe look at some of the better movies this year for our solution.

Take Jurassic Park for instance, the franchise got a polarizing and a bad sequel, yet Jurassic World is considered a somewhat good movie better than the first two sequels.  The reason for that is because while the film had nostalgic moments, key moments being the appearance of classic dinosaurs and the fight between the Raptor and the I-Rex, along with the appearance of a Jeep from the first movie; nostalgia does not dominate its plot.  In fact its plot as not a rehash of any of the old movies  and nostalgia are used instead as Easter eggs to nod to older fans, or as in the case of the Raptors and the T-Rex teaming up against the I-Rex, reinterpreted for the purpose of the movie.

Alternatively, a movie could do away with nostalgia and introduce new and fresh themes torwards the plot.  This was the case with Mad Max Fury Road.  Instead of simply rehashing the plot of the first three movies, it created a new plot with little or no explanation or retreading of the plots of the old movies.  In fact it could be said that, when you look at Mad Max, the film has less to do with Max and more of to do with the story they are telling.  In many ways, Max is less of the main protagonist and more of an eye for the audience to see the events unfold in the movie.  He spends the early parts of the movie captured by the main antagonist, a despotic warlord who promises water to those who serve him, and Valhalla to those who die for him--all while ruling over the powerless and enslaving women in his harems to provide children for him and then disposed when they have served what he designates as their only purpose.  The character that tries to escape this horrendous system is Imperator Furiosa, who tries to save the warlord's wives by taking them to one of the places not scarred by nuclear war.  And instead of the person inspiring Furiosa and the wives to act, Max comes along for the ride and just "helps out".  Furiosa however is the one who flees from the Citadel and becomes the prey in the chase—and she does so  to free herself and other women from slavery, to try to give hope to others, and to seek her own redemption after being complicit in furthering the oppression perpetuated by her former leader.

In many ways, Max, and Nux, the War Boy that defects is instead pressured to act because of the actions of Furiosa.  The former is an apathetic person who chooses to wander and let others suffer due to the tragedies that have haunted his life.  The latter deliberately helps to perpetuates the oppression of the Citadel.  Yet through Furiosa's heroism, both of them find the revelation that feminism is necessary not only for women, but for the creation of a better world; and they convince Furiosa to return to the Citadel to free all from Immortan Joe's control when all hope is lost.  And through that victory in which the Citadel is liberated, Nux dies repentant and Max reclaiming the nobler part of his soul from the wasteland, and choosing to continue his life as a force for good, trying to reclaim justice when there is none.

In many ways this example sends a message, or an allegory.  Despite the fact that Mad Max is set in a post-apocalyptic dystopia and dealt with complex and dark themes, it ultimately is a story that is engulfed with a hopeful and positive message. Few other films of this nature manage to have that chemistry and in fact, most tend to slip towards the side of darkness too far in and leave no hope.  What Mad Max does is that the theme of hopelessness is deconstructed.  Within popular media, it sometimes feels as if the only way to sell audiences movies of a grand scale is to make things dark and hopeless, to prevent the audience from visualizing a better world of which they should struggle to achieve.  We are shown worlds worse or more dystopic than ours of which the protagonists fail and fail to achieve a semblance of peace because there is no "lesser evil" to guide society away from "greater evils".  so if we manage merely to keep things the way they are, we should be happy we achieved that much and stop railing against systemic oppression such rape culture, perpetual war, or rampant corportization and economic inequality.

This is done without any consideration of how current social problems may cause society to decay or become the dystopias portrayed by fiction.  Mad Max: Fury Road challenges these worldviews and shows that when social order itself has become part of the problem and no different from what it considers to be "greater evils"(in this case the tyranny of Immortan Joe vs. the desolation of the wasteland), the status quo needs to be brought down so that there is a chance of a better future.  Overall Mad Max finds its footing by instead of reliving what used to make the movies good and doing throwback after throwback, it reinvents itself and casts a new protagonist with a message for the audience that is just as much relevant as it is original.

With this in mind, what should JJ Abrams' Star Wars trilogy be about?  It is clear that doing constant throwbacks isn't enough to justify a good fictional medium if that is all the movie uses to sustain itself as history has shown.  Instead as such, the movie should carve a new path differing from the Star Wars that has existed before. They can use occasional throwbacks to pay homage to what came before, but do so in a subtle sense over blatant rehashing of concepts that existed beforehand.  JJ and co. should, instead of making a big reunion of all the Original Trilogy cast for the sake of nostalgia take instead  the story of Star Wars into a place we haven't seen from George Lucas's universe or the now-defunct Expanded Universe.   

Furthermore, it should be noted that, with the success of Mad Max in mind, the theme of the entire sequel trilogy doesn't have to be necessary dark and hopeless to appeal to an audience.  While Trilogy fans often cite the Empire Strikes Back as their favorite movie out of the originals for being dark and imaginative, and some tolerate Revenge of the Sith for that same reason(and of course Saga fans will say ROTS is the best out of all the prequels for that exact reason).  Yet at the same time, when we look at the allegory going on for Star Wars it can be seen it tells the exact same message as Mad Max. So you know, the generation of people in the prequels faced in the end something worse than what they could have imagined, yet it eerily resembles part of what our society is going through, or a dystopian possibility--Palpatine, much like our current leaders in this war on terror has manipulated the galaxy with promises of security and safety from the so-called "terrorists" and "separatists", that they invest power in him to decide who lives and who dies.  The Galactic Republic was reorganized into a Galactic Empire under pretext of protecting the populace from what its leaders deep to be a "threat" or "different".  As such the creation of rebellion as seen in the Originals is less of a traditional tale of good versus evil when we factor in the Prequels, but a call to challenge the status quo perpetuated by our own inaction.  While trilogy fans can argue that the presentation of the Prequels prevents this from being told convincingly, that dosen't mean it shouldn't be told at all.  These issues are still here and still relevant today and JJ Abrams should at the very least return to  reintrepret them in newer ways, somewhat reminiscent yet different as to what is presented in the PT.

Ultimately, when all of this is considered it can be seen that simply appealing to nostalgia does not make a good movie by default.  Instead what makes good works of fiction are how original it could be and in some cases, how relevant it could be.  Thus, instead of focusing on nostalgic throwbacks, The Force Awakens and its sequels should instead create new theme or reinterpret old ones in new ways.  It should combine what people liked about the Prequels and the Originals, but without their weaknesses and tailored to a new audience, not the demands of an old one.

ADDENDUM: Some may point out that CGI use is the reason Terminator 5 failed to "save" that franchise in contrast to the use of practical effects for Mad Max and hopefully for the sequel trilogy.  This however neglects the fact that CGI is often an afterthought stated after the statement of Terminator 5's problems to the point where you can argue that Terminator would have sucked even without CGI.  Jurassic World used CGI but the critique is mostly silent, and no one complains about CGI for the Avengers, where the entire final battle with Loki and his army given to him by Thanos was---CGI and Green Screen with a few sets in between.