All of these elements are on display in The Force Awakens, a movie that shamelessly panders to nostalgia while also charting an extraordinary future for the franchise, a movie that is great fun but whose sequences are held together by outrageous coincidence or through a complete disregard for narrative connective tissue. Abrams is, for me, a frustrating filmmaker because he has an eye that is strong, a knack for casting that might be unparalleled and an ability to pace his movies at a rate that sweeps you along faster than you can notice the narrative chasms that he’s leaping. The Force Awakens is completely and totally a JJ Abrams movie, with all that entails, good and bad. Very often during the course of the movie I would roll my eyes at some kind of callback or on-the-nose reference to the Original Trilogy only to immediately start smiling ear-to-ear at how magical and alive these characters were. Every single major new character is an instant classic, and every single one of them is a character I want to follow through many films, just as we followed Luke and Han and Leia. When it comes to character The Force Awakens delivers on a massive level. The Force Awakens contains little that’s original, just familiar elements slightly remixed.Īt least when it comes to story. While The Force Awakens feels like the Original Trilogy in design and spirit it misses one of the things that made the OT magical in the moment - a sense of discovery from film to film, a universe that constantly showed us new weird things. There’s a cantina and a bad guy base with deep trenches and no guardrails. Space pirate/Yoda figure Maz Kanata lives in the jungle temple this time, and Starkiller Base itself is kinda Hoth-y. The Resistance base isn’t on Yavin IV, but you’d be hard pressed to tell the difference. The desert planet of Jakku is Tatooine in all but name. The Force Awakens doesn’t take us to familiar locations from the original films, but that’s a formality. As I watched a squad of X-Wings attack a planet-destroying superweapon that they could only approach after a group of intrepid heroes on the ground disabled the shields I wondered how a universe of infinite possibilities had brought us to this scenario yet again. This movie rhymes, and it rhymes hard, so hard that sometimes scenes feel less like organic moments of storytelling than attempts to revisit concepts from the Original Trilogy. “It’s like poetry, they rhyme,” George Lucas famously said about the Prequels, and that may be the only thing that JJ Abrams and Lawrence Kasdan took from Episodes I-III when writing The Force Awakens. And the kid growing up on a backwater desert planet would rather stay there waiting for her family than escape and follow in their footsteps. This time it’s a Stormtrooper dressing up as a rebel. It’s not a princess who hides valuable data in a droid and is tortured for it, it’s an X-Wing pilot. It’s not a remake or a reboot, but it’s a movie that tells a story not entirely dissimilar from the original Star Wars, except that many of the familiar beats and moments have a spin put on them. The Force Awakens is the Star Wars movie for remix and remake culture. This sort of functions as a metaphor for the entire movie, which is kind of a reboot of A New Hope, but bigger and more sprawling and also containing elements of Empire and Jedi. He’s immediately told it’s not - this thing is 17 times bigger than the Death Star, and it's not a space station, it's a whole planet. Set between Star Wars: A New Hope and Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, the story finds Luke Skywalker, C-3PO, and R2-D2 stranded on a mysterious planet, and explores a dangerous duel between Luke and a strange new villain.“It’s another Death Star,” says an X-Wing pilot at a briefing, talking about Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ Starkiller Base.
Luke Skywalker returns for an all-new adventure in this thrilling upper middle grade novel.
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