‘The Force Awakens’ Came Out 10 Years Ago Today

It doesn’t feel like a long time ago. But it’s now been ten years since Star Wars: The Force Awakens debuted in theaters.

I’ll remember that date — December 18, 2015 — as long as I live. It wasn’t just the day J.J. Abrams’ The Force Awakens opened in multiplexes around the world. It was also my oldest daughter’s due date. My freaking out about the birth of my first child was magnified by my additional freaking out about whether she’d wait long enough to be born so I could help ScreenCrush cover what was not only the first Star Wars movie in a decade, but also probably the most anticipated movie of any kind over that same stretch of time.  

Thankfully, my daughter waited to arrive until December 21, so it all worked out — for me, at least. For Lucasfim and its new corporate overlords at Disney, the return of Star Wars was a bit more complicated. The Force Awakens itself was an unqualified triumph; people forget that it’s still the single highest-grossing film in the history of the U.S. box office. ($936.6 million — roughly $150 million more than the first Avatar.)

The reason they tend to forget that is because two years later Rian Johnson’s Star Wars: The Last Jedi followed, and proved so divisive that Disney and Lucasfilm then brought back Abrams to conclude the trilogy (and ignore some of the changes made to it in The Last Jedi by Johnson) in 2019’s Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. That sequel, in turn, proved so unpopular that it basically soured all of fandom on Star Wars movies in the short-term. Disney hasn’t released a new Star Wars film since. (The first one in seven years, The Mandalorian and Grogu, premieres next spring.)

READ MORE: This Is the Correct Viewing Order For Star Wars

Watching The Force Awakens ten years later, it’s impossible to completely separate the film from the controversial chapters that followed. We know now that this story does not exactly end happily (for the audience, at least, if not the characters). But viewed on its own, The Force Awakens really does take you back to that time a decade ago when the return of Star Wars felt exciting and fresh.

Yes, the film closely follows the structural blueprint of George Lucas’ 1977 Star Wars. It’s got a trio of young heroes in a battle with a villain clad in black and his vast army of Stormtroopers. Yes, there is an all-important MacGuffin robot stranded on a remote dessert planet. Yes, there are wise older heroes to impart wisdom and guidance to the new generation. Yes, there is a giant space station shaped like a moon that shoots world-breaking lasers. Yes, the female character gets kidnapped and yes the rest of the heroes rescue her and yes, the older member of their party dies in the process, and yes, the good guys succeed in destroying the giant space station, giving hope to their little galactic rebellion.

Okay, when you put it like that, The Force Awakens is pretty close to the first Star Wars. The reason it works anyway is because those familiar beats work in concert with Abrams’ ultimate goal: Crafting an unabashed love letter to vintage Star Wars. Lucas’ prequel films of the late 1990s and early 2000s presented a high-gloss, heavily digitized update of the franchise. They were visually impressive — and totally antiseptic. They looked every bit what they were: Films made with enormous computer-generated imagery.

But the first wave of Star Wars fans loved the old movies for their tactility. They existed in a futuristic world (a long time ago) that felt gritty and lived in. That’s what Abrams restored to the series with The Force Awakens. It’s a movie with dirt under its fingernails, and almost literally.

For example, all three new Force Awakens heroes receive introductions that accentuate the grit and grime of their worlds. Oscar Isaac’s hotshot pilot Poe Dameron gets captured by the First Order, and then beaten to a bloody pulp. He’s still covered in blood and bruises when he’s rescued by John Boyega’s Finn, who was marked as different from the rest of his squad by a bloody handprint on his Stormtrooper helmet.

Next Abrams shifts to the dusty world of Jakku and Daisy Ridley’s Rey, who is first seen scavenging and cleaning scrap metal from the ruins of an old Star Destroyer to sell to junk dealer Unkar Plutt. On this viewing, I was particularly struck by how often in The Force Awakens Ridley’s skin looks slick with sweat, and her hair gets slightly out of place, with flyaways flapping in the wind  — again accentuating the grimy imperfect reality of life in the Star Wars galaxy.

For better or for worse, Disney’s sequel trilogy was the first generation of Star Wars movies made by Star Wars fans. And for better or worse, The Force Awakens is particularly imbued with enthusiasm for this specific brand of Star Wars. Its complicated villain, Adam Driver’s Kylo Ren, is basically a Darth Vader fanboy, cosplaying in his own homemade homage to his favorite Star Wars character. When no one’s looking, he prays to Vader’s charred skull.

But then Poe is something of a fanboy too; when he escapes from Kylo Ren’s ship with Finn‘s help, he takes a moment to explain “I’ve always wanted to fly one of these things!” before he commandeers a TIE fighter. The same goes for Rey, whose response to meeting Han Solo for the first time is the same one a lot of hardcore Star Wars fans would have if they bumped into Harrison Ford at the airport: “You’re Han Solo!”

That excitement for the franchise is pretty infectious, especially in the film’s early scenes. The Force Awakens still looks very good for a ten year old movie, perhaps because Abrams emphasized practical sets, costumes, and droids wherever and however he could. There are more long takes in the movie than I remembered, and they mostly emphasize the magical nature of Star Wars — like when the camera lingers on a bowl as Rey dumps in one-quarter portion of food from Unkar Plutt. The concoction stirs, fizzles, settles, then somehow morphs into a grubby green-brown roll, all without a single cut.

All that giddiness dissipates in the third act, which includes the buzzkill murder of (ten-year-old spoiler alert) Han Solo by Kylo Ren. Death is an intrinsic part of Star Wars, and in The Last Jedi Luke Skywalker offers the poignant observation that “no one’s ever really gone” in their world — a point underlined by Harrison Ford’s brief appearance as Han’s ghost in The Rise of Skywalker. But, again, watched on its own, Kylo killing Han does sort of suck all the air out of the film. The Force Awakens’ whole visual palette darkens at that moment, and it only gets a little brighter in its epilogue, when Rey finds the long-missing Luke and tries to coax him back into the Resistance by offering him his father’s lightsaber.

Those of us who have been following Star Wars for the last ten years (and the 35-odd years before that) know what happened next. It wasn’t always great. (Star Wars is kind of like life in that way.) But the exhilaration we felt for The Force Awakens — and that The Force Awakens felt for Star Wars — need not be forgotten because some of the subsequent movies didn’t quite live up to expectations. If we remember how we felt ten years ago, that sort of emotion’s never really gone either.