Star Wars: The Force Awakens has been released for more than two months, with fans regaling it as the best addition to the Star Wars franchise since 1983’s Return Of The Jedi. As good as J.J. Abrams’ Star Wars adventure was, The Force Awakens was not without its flaws. In addition to some plot holes and implausibilities, there was one common criticism that people had. Namely, that The Force Awakens is far too similar to the original film, A New Hope.
Wired.com just published a piece which highlights how eerily similar the two Star Wars movies are. Derek Ruths, a McGill University professor, took the scripts to both The Force Awakens and A New Hope and did a detailed comparison regarding the characters. The results: the two Star Wars films are apparently the same movie.
The study took each of the main characters, and followed how their story was presented in the respective scripts. Each character’s path was dissected; how many scenes they had, when the scenes happened chronologically, and who they interacted with were all taken into account. Ater Derek Ruths tallied this data, he compared the two film’s results and found some interesting similarities.
Derek Ruths found that, unsurprisingly, the characters were in three distinct groups: the funny droids, humans fighting against the man, and Force users who duked it out. While this doesn’t exactly seem groundbreaking, which characters from the films correspond to each other is somewhat bizarre.
For instance, Poe Dameron doesn’t match up with Han Solo, as many people might assume because of their similarly cocky attitude. In fact, Poe’s part in The Force Awakens most closely relates to Luke Skywalker himself. Additionally, Obi- Wan Kenobi’s role in A New Hope most closely resembles to the always moody Kylo Ren. Rather than being the lead character, they were featured similar amounts of time and both interacted most with the character whose power was being awakened.
Of course, there are some blaring celebrities between certain characters. For instance, BB-8 and R2-D2 have very similar tracks. Additionally, Chewbacca’s roles and screen time between both films are pretty identical. Since Chewie doesn’t have any real lines, this isn’t much of a surprise. Of course, the Wookie did break our heart during that controversial scene at the end of The Force Awakens.
Overall, the study is a pretty fascinating read. Of course, this gives extra ammo to the naysayers who have been hating on The Force Awakens due to similarities with A New Hope. Regardless of the similarities between the two films, I thoroughly enjoyed The Force Awakens and look forward to getting my hands on the deleted scenes once home copies are released.
The Blu-Ray for The Force Awakens will be released April 1st 2016.
