star wars the force awakens movie review

There is Rey, a resourceful survivor on the remote planet of Jakku, who feels destiny within her: she is played by newcomer Daisy Ridley with the brittle determination of a young Keira Knightley. Ranged against them are new fighters for good.

The dark force is resurgent in the form of the First Order, intent on re-establishing a more candidly fascist control, with quasi-Nuremberg rallies. Princess Leia is now a General and still the warrior queen of the resistance - a tougher and more grandmotherly figure. Suffice it to say that Luke, played by a now grizzled Mark Hamill, is a potent but unwontedly enigmatic presence. Luke has been famously absent from the poster for this film, which led me to fear at first that over the past 30 years, like Atticus Finch in Harper Lee’s Go Set A Watchman, he had gone over to the dark side. All this agony is reborn in The Force Awakens: new contortions of fear and black-comic absurdity amidst the romance and excitement. Luke was driven by an increasingly complex Freudian animus against Darth Vader Han Solo referred to the Millennium Falcon as “she” male audiences were encouraged both to identify with Luke and to lech over Princess Leia in her outrageous gold slave bikini – and then, with exquisite narrative sadism, we were told they were brother and sister. The original movies were always based on the most extraordinary nexus of personal and family dysfunction: a motor of guilt, shame and conflict. The stars talk on the red carpet at Monday’s LA premiere Guardian This notice will be a safe space, incidentally, with a trigger warning only for basic plot points and material already in the public domain. Familiar personae, situations and weapons will appear like covers or remixes, and meshed in with new storylines. JJ Abrams and veteran co-writer Lawrence Kasdan have created a film which is both a narrative progression from the earlier three films and a shrewdly affectionate next-gen reboot of the original 1977 Star Wars - rather in the style of his tremendous re-imagining of the Kirk/Spock Star Trek. And when Han Solo and Chewie come on, I had a feeling in the cinema I haven’t had since I was 16: not knowing whether to burst into tears or into applause. There are very few films which leave me facially exhausted after grinning for 135 minutes, but this is one. The Force Awakens re-awoke my love of the first movie and turned my inner fanboy into my outer fanboy. My only tiny reservation, which I will get out of the way now, is with a tiny new droid who has a bit of a Scrappy-Doo vibe about him. The Force Awakens is in touch with the force of action-adventure and fun. It restores the comedy that Phantom Menace abandoned. Technically, of course, that was reconfigured as Episode Six, but The Force Awakens makes you forget about the redundancy and pedantry of the prequel-trilogy that came 15 years later.

Star wars the force awakens movie review