Star Wars The Force Awakens Movie Review

Reviews

Star Wars: Episode Seven - The Force Awakens

May incorporate spoilers

"Star Wars: Episode Seven - The Force Awakens" is the film that J.J. Abrams was put on Globe to make, equally evidenced past the "Star Wars" echoes in his hit series "Lost," and the way he kept trying to turn "Star Expedition" into "Star Wars." These tendencies could seem cutesy or irritating elsewhere, only they make sense in an according-to-Hoyle "Star Wars" movie. This new i, ready thirty years after the events of "Return of the Jedi," is funny, touching, and surprisingly light-footed. It boasts a lot of familiar elements, including Skywalker family unit mythology and another Death Star-type weapon, as well as self-aware lines most how things work in this series. The film ultimately runs up against the limitations of its own nature: like the James Bail films, the "Star Wars" movies are pretty much obligated to revisit certain elements, to the betoken where they might feel played out fifty-fifty if they hadn't been raided by other films, Television receiver shows and books (including Harry Potter). But it'south nevertheless an exhilarating ride, filled with archetypal characters with plausible psychologies, melodramatic confrontations fueled past soaring emotions, and performances that can be described as good, menstruation, rather than "skillful, for 'Star Wars.'"

And information technology'due south a care for to see beloved older characters placed beside new ones in situations that respect Lucas' myth-making simply correct his flaws every bit a storyteller, including the default whiteness of his casts. Non simply have Abrams and his co-writers, Lawrence Kasdan and Michael Arndt, centered the story on a young woman and a man of color (played respectively by Daisy Ridley and John Boyega), they've made them and so compelling and quirky that the film never seems to be putting an upwards-to-appointment wrapping on moldy clichés. Similar all of the new characters, they seem to live and breathe. When they earn the respect of Han Solo (Harrison Ford) and Chewbacca (Peter Mayhew) by improvising a solution to a technical problem, or catch a lightsaber and starting time swinging, the result is not merely a crowd-pleasing display of heroics; information technology'due south an affirmation that a good film with a good middle can serve equally everyone's mirror. (Spoilers from hither.)

Decades after Darth Vader threw his primary down an elevator shaft, the galaxy is yet wracked by state of war. The Republic is still the Republic, only now they're not-too-secretly financing the rebellion confronting the remnants of the Empire, which has been supplanted past something called the First Order. The Empire went into retreat in "Jedi" when Luke Skywalker (Marking Hamill) turned his begetter dorsum toward the light side of The Force. Simply the Empire's remnants were tenacious. At present that Luke has gone into hiding following a disastrous attempt to train a new course of Jedi, they've gained force and audacity, and built a variation of the Death Star that'south embedded in a living planet—basically an artillery cannon with intergalactic range. The re-branded Imperials look and sound fifty-fifty more Nazi-like than the villains from the first trilogy. 1 of the simply scenes where Abrams completely overdoes it (which is hard to do in a "Star Wars" moving-picture show) is the rally prior to the super weapon'southward inaugural blast: the supreme commander of the First Order (Domnhall Gleeson) addresses tens of thousands of troops bundled in Leni Riefenstahl patterns, jamming his pasty confront into the photographic camera and practically spitting into the lens.

The plot kicks into gear on the surface of the desert planet Jakku. A wisecracking 10-wing pilot named Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac) acquires a fragment of a map that reveals Skywalker's location from an Obi-Wan-similar elderberry (Max von Sydow, groomed and costumed to resemble Alec Guinness). He hides information technology inside his trusty droid, BB-eight, a rolling ball with a segmented caput that can do great vaudeville double-takes, only to be captured by the film's chief baddie, Kylo Ren (Adam Commuter). Ren is an iron-masked, black-clad, homicidally depressed warrior who flies into room-destroying rages and speaks to the recovered helmet of Darth Vader like Hamlet addressing Yorick'southward skull. When Ren removes his helmet to reveal Driver's long face up and watery eyes, we may feel as though we're seeing the second coming of young Anakin Skywalker, who had expert in him but gave in to boyish power fantasies and let the Emperor corrupt him. "I tin have anything I want," Ren petulantly tells a captive who resists his mental probing.

In brusque order, we run into the film'due south other new leads: Rey (Ridley), an orphaned scrap-metal scavenger, and the ex-Stormtrooper Finn (Boyega), a careful objector who went AWOL after watching Ren and his tempest trooper armada carry out a My Lai-style massacre while searching for BB-8 and his map. Then Rey, Finn and BB-eight escape a strafing run past Necktie fighters by piling into Han'due south onetime ship, the Millennium Falcon, which just happens to be endemic by one of Rey's chip metallic customers, and get captured past a freighter that only happens to be piloted past Han and Chewie, who just happen to be searching for the Falcon in that part of space. As in every "Star Wars" pic, this one leans on gamble meetings and coincidences, and you just accept to accept them equally the sort of things that would happen in a fairy tale or opera—or at the very to the lowest degree, as proof that the milky way is smaller than it looks. The Starkiller Base is ten times the size of the last Decease Star, but key characters cantankerous paths inside of it so regularly that it might every bit well be a U-boat.

Lucas' prequels balanced light with gathering darkness, and rhymed scenes, situations and shots with the original trilogy's, to create a sense of history repeating and inverting itself. Abrams and visitor have done something similar in "The Force Awakens," simply at the level of characterization and scene-building. This is a subtler way to revise (or recycle) elements in a popular franchise while finding something new in them, and it explains why this film feels more fully realized than any "Star Wars" movie since "The Empire Strikes Dorsum"—it'due south certainly warmer than the prequels, which oft failed at characterization and plot even as they served upwardly intricate sequences and haunting images.

The map subconscious within BB-8 is this movie's equivalent of the Death Star plans hidden in R2-D2 in "A New Hope"; Jakku is basically Tatooine; other planets evoke icy Hoth from "The Empire Strikes Back" and the tropical moons of "A New Hope" and "Return of the Jedi." Wrecked star destroyers poke upwards through sand dunes; a leathery-skinned reptilian pachyderm jams its snout into a watering hole; Tie fighters loom against boiling sunsets; a thousand-year one-time temple crumbles beneath an onslaught of laser bolts. This stuff might seem like fan fiction illustrated by calendar art if Abrams didn't balance spectacle with feeling. Rey is the new Luke, but also the new Han, while Finn is a combination of Luke, Han Solo and a C-3PO worrywart. ("Stay calm," Finn says during a tense walk alongside Poe. "I am calm," Poe snarls. "I'm talking to myself," Finn explains.) Simply even though Finn is the film's funniest character, the script never goes then far as to turn him into mere comic relief. Nor does it permit Rey to become a glorified ingenue. Finn and Rey are tormented by believable personal demons and wield their blasters and lightsabers with fervor. You believe they could hold their own against Ren, who can finish blaster bolts in mid-air and spelunk inside prisoners' minds. And yous believe in the reality of CGI'd supporting characters as well, including Andy Serkis' Supreme Leader Snoke, a gollum-esque dictator with a hideous puckered mouth whose hologram image is the size of the Lincoln Memorial, and Lupita Nyong'o's Maz Kanata, a diminutive, ancient pirate whose goggled eyes can see into people's souls.

Elsewhere, Abrams proves that that he'due south given equally much thought to the larger cultural meanings of "Star Wars" as to its iconic characters, gadgets and spaceships. Many picture show historians have noted the style Lucas'due south first flick, which came out two years after the end of US interest in Vietnam, flipped that war'southward script upside-down, making defeated Americans identify with "rebels" who were essentially Vietcong-similar guerrillas, and root confronting an industrialized war machine whose literally-scorched-world tactics were all too Western. A shot of a storm trooper roasting a hut with a flamethrower brings the original trilogy'due south Vietnam obsession total-circle (to Republic of iraq, maybe), even as the dogfights—many of which are conducted inside planetary atmospheres—reconnect "Star Wars" with the propellers-and-goggles adventures that enthralled Lucas as a child. Like the movie'south endless references to other "Star Wars" setpieces—including both Death Star battles, the Dagobah tree scene from "Empire," and the creature menageries of "A New Promise," "Jedi" and "Attack of the Clones"—the historical allusions never overwhelm the basic story, which is very much in the spirit of the 1977 original: a agglomeration of nobodies end up saving the galaxy, with a mighty assist from a wise elder.

These films are a part of American history, cinema history, and our personal history, all at in one case. The new faces upwards there on the screen are as compelling as the familiar ones because they remind usa that in the world of "Star Wars," every bit in our earth, life goes on no matter what.