Obviously, spoilers for Star Wars: The Force Awakens are below.
A few weeks ago I was scouring Target looking for any available Captain Phasma figures in my area. I like collecting 6″ figures and wanted to add what I thought would be the best thing about The Force Awakens to my shelf. Gwendoline Christie is a delight both on screen and off (based on my impressions, I do not know her personally), so I was excited that she would be, in all things, Star Wars.
When The Force Awakens started and Captain Phasma walked on screen I smiled ear-to-ear. That smile quickly faded. For all its high marks, The Force Awakens fumbled Captain Phasma so badly it’s almost embarrassing.
Make no mistake: Star Wars: The Force Awakens is as wonderful as you’d hoped. A bit slavish to the original trilogy perhaps, but I’m thankful to finally see a good, possibly great Star Wars movie (I’ll need multiple viewings) in my lifetime. It will really make you wonder what kind of wasted effort the whole prequel trilogy was, if that wasn’t already obvious. I hope Force Awakens shuts up the grating prequel apologists.
But Force Awakens isn’t without its own missteps, and by far the most glaring is Captain Phasma. There was hope she’d succeed the legacy of Boba Fett, the badass gunslinger antagonist, the “Dragon” who has no other motivation than to get the job done. But she does end up succeeding Boba Fett’s legacy in the worst ways, that is being a total chump.
When Force Awakens begins she’s as ruthless and robotic as anyone wanted, functioning as a scary authoritarian against Finn (then still named FN-2187). Instructing him to see his rifle’s data whether or not he fired on the villagers is an Orwellian nightmare. We’re off to a good start!
But the rug is quickly pulled underneath. The next time we see Phasma beyond standing there for set dressing, it’s when Finn, Han, and Chewie have infiltrated the Starkiller base and hold Phasma hostage. Finn has some bottled-up tension towards her — it’s played for a laugh, and to my delight colors Finn’s character more — but it never had proper set-up. From what we saw, it was only that one time right after the opening village massacre. It makes me wonder what J.J. Abrams cut out that would have maybe really allowed Phasma to be the big scary threat she deserves.
But in the final version of Force Awakens, she isn’t. With a rifle to her head, she begrudgingly lowers the shields to allow the Resistance to enter the planet’s atmosphere. The camera turns their attention away from her for a few seconds, so when she defiantly stands up I thought she had managed to alert the First Order — she’s at a goddamn computer! — but she doesn’t. The shield lowers like Han and Finn want and she basically has a line like Dr. Claw from Inspector Gadget: Next time, Finn, next time! She goes out like a lame-o, with Han slyly suggesting they chuck her out a “trash compactor.” Cue audience laughing, my eyes rolling.
It happens off screen. We never see Phasma again for the rest of the movie.
Despite its imagination, Star Wars has long had a remarkably narrow representation of gender and ethnic diversities. Yes, there are aliens, but there are real people in our real world who deserve to be inspired by the images on screen. I never felt like Luke Skywalker no matter how many times I watched Star Wars. Even if he was written like cardboard, I was still attached to Adam the Black Ranger from Power Rangers, because he looked like me. I don’t look like Luke.
When it comes to women, Star Wars has been embarrassingly devoid, almost to the point where I wonder how anyone in that universe is born. Name five prominent women — name them, off your head, no Wikipedia — from the other six movies. You can’t, right? And that’s what makes Force Awakens almost like fresh air. I can’t sing the praises of Daisy Ridley’s Rey nearly enough. Beyond the stellar performance of Ridley (who is without a doubt the breakout star of Force Awakens), Rey is extremely capable and complex. This isn’t “Girl power!” feminism, though I’ll be happy when little girls watching Star Wars say she’s their hero. Rey is legit character, a modern textbook example aspiring screenwriters should study.
And there’s more than just her! Carrie Fischer is back as Leia, who has become a grizzled general. There’s Maz Kanata as a comforting guide, and played by Lupita Nyong’o who is stunning in her role despite being a cartoon. There’s another really cool side character, an X-Wing pilot played by Christina Chong. We don’t really get to know her and most of the heroic action is taken up by Oscar Isaac’s Poe, but her close-ups in the pilot seats give enough of a look that she might be someone’s favorite.
And there should have been Captain Phasma, but she’s so lame. I can actually think of a great scene that would have been perfect for her: Right around the second act before Leia and C-3PO arrive, the First Order attacks and Finn holds Luke’s lightsaber. He uses it for the first time against a random Stormtrooper with a really, really fucking awesome weapon that looks like a giant tonfa. Finn and this Stormtrooper go at it in one of the first fist-pumping moments in the entire movie. While I wouldn’t want Phasma to have lost the fight like the Stormtrooper did, it would have been damn near perfect for hers and Finn’s arc. Yeah, it came before the Starkiller base stuff, but still. That scene begs for Phasma to show off what she could do.
The silver lining (no pun intended — get it, she’s in chrome armor?) is that Phasma is still alive. If they actually chucked her into a garbage chute (ugh), it’s barely crippling so she’ll get out, unlike Fett and the sand butthole. I hope she really comes to her own in Star Wars VIII, but that movie is some 500+ days away. And I’m tired of waiting for Star Wars to give me the good stuff.
On the upside: I get to save like $30 on eBay buying a Captain Phasma figure.
Side note: Boba Fett was an interesting demonstration of using telling, not showing that was effective. His introduction had Darth Vader, the baddest motherfucker in the galaxy, finger lecture Fett with “No disintegrations.” One line establishes how much of a loose cannon Fett was, and that one line filled the imagination for decades. Phasma does not have that moment one bit, which further makes her appearance in The Force Awakens a bummer.