Reviews will be flooding in, but I think I'll get mine in a little quickly. This is a great movie, an amazing movie. There are very evident and glaring flaws with it though, sacrifices made in storytelling and many weak moments in storytelling. The positive? This does not detract from the storytelling. I liked
Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, but even as a kid I hated
Attack of the Clones. There is something very weird about falling for a girl eight years your elder who had a maternal effect on you as a child.
Nonetheless, as I have said before, the main highlights in this film come from an acting perspective. I have never enjoyed Adam Driver in anything. I hated his acting in
Girls. Everything about him I hated. His voice, his swagger, his stupid hairstyle. Yet I loved him in this movie. He is one of the people to look out for. Like a pasty Severus Snape, Kylo Ren's face below the mask may have been revealed unceremony in a magazine, but it feels cold to look at once you see it in the movie. He associates the Dark Side of the Force with coldness like the Emperor associated it with power. Driver commands a presence, definitely not to the degree of Darth Vader, but powerful nonetheless. Another Imperial character of the First Order whom I thoroughly enjoyed was General Hux, played Domhnall Gleeson. Essentially a power hungry Tarkin-esque figure, Hux is every bit as commanding as Ren. While Ren seems pure fantasy, Hux sees more real. Not because he does not have the force, but because the way his character is, Hux is likely unintentionally analagous to several people in our world.
The heroes. Harrison Ford is a delight as always and despite being the "straight man" in the galaxy in the Original Trilogy, we come back to find that while the galaxy has not changed, the straight man has. Empire vs Rebellion, Order vs Resistance, the conflicts that our heroes walk through are very similar to what we know and love. Yet, none of the heroes are analogues to those of the old trilogy. People had been saying stuff like Poe is a pilot so he will be like Han Solo! No, he is not. The closest we get to is in Finn, but he deserves his own paragraph. This one is for Poe, Han and Leia. The thing about Han is that it was hard for me to judge whether or not his performance was good because I wanted to like it. So I did like it. Everything about him was glorious. While Hamill may have taken voice acting by storm and while Fisher may have become a renowned script doctor, Ford became big through acting. Proving his acting chops through several films over the years, watch
The Fugitive, seeing him return to such an iconic role you assure yourself that even if the movie blows - he doesn't. Carrie Fisher has not been in much since
Return of the Jedi, as I've said, she has become a great script doctor. Yet her acting is best described as fluid. She has aged, but her acting style has not gotten rusty at all. She remains great still, with amazing synergy between her and Harrison. Their moments are the ones that bring tears to your eyes. Then Poe... Oscar Isaac is an amazing actor and I am excited to see what happens. Trust me though, the highlight Oscar Isaac will have on screen was in the
X-Men: Apocalypse trailer. He does not get shafted, he does not get much at all. What he does get, he makes work very well and through him we get that wittiness that we loved so much. It is not a lot though. You like his character, but there is not much to invest in. What little there is to invest in, though, it means a lot. What about Rey? Well I didn't really care much for her because of how her story felt. It was distant to me, but it may not be to you. Daisy Ridley definately did prove herself to be a badass though, and definitely can stand with the legends.
Tone is a very important thing and JJ Abrams approaches his material with a sense of legacy. Yet he has done that for pretty much all of his films. There is a sense of inheritance. You feel the adventure of
Star Wars, the darkness of
The Empire Strikes Back and the mix found in
Return of the Jedi. JJ approaches this film through the lens of the previous ones. He shows us how beautiful they would look if they were made today. There are practical effects and there is a lot of CGI - but it is the story that makes you notice the beauty of the world that makes you realize that the CGI is not bad. Of course some of you will hate on it for being CGI in the first place. The problem with this approach is that there is a lot of nostalgia and with this comes a lot of "hey remember this?". The good thing is that does not happen very often. That approach to the story is where it slightly fails and has a derivative nature. The story in my opinion was well crafted for the most part, but please, don't go in expecting JJ Abrams to have made the second coming of Kubrick because the plot does fall apart at places and not all subplots are great. If you do, you will be disappointed. If you go in expected a fantastic space adventure I guarantee a slightly derivative nature will not annoy you and theorizing afterwards will make you love the film.
Oh and the soundtrack is by John Williams, you know it's good.
Now here comes my one main gripe with the film that left me very disappointed. The character of Finn. You can stop reading now because what I type may or may not lead you to infer a spoiler. I'll give a pause.
Character development is great in Finn, moreso than any other character in the movie. Imagine a parabola, whether it opens upwards or downwards,
on an interval it starts and ends. It does not randomly linearize on a point in the interval. You do not look at a picture of a Tiger, go to the zoo, see something orange in the bushes and have a bear come out. Finn goes from one point to another and seeing his transformation is amazing. John Boyega would have become a big star one way or another, and I'm glad it wasn't through BBC. I was just incredibly disappointed with Abrams' handling of Finn after having read
this before having gone in. It's why I am confident that Rian Johnson will do better. Let me make clear the issues I have posted above,
they all relate to a lack of clarity from Abrams and lack of focus regarding Finn after we saw him treat the character with so much passion. Just like Poe though, Abrams' gets us to invest in Finn's character development, because he makes us care about this guy. Regardless of my issues, that's what's important, right?
So, what do I give the movie?
8.5/10 aka 85% aka B-Plus:
Some glaring issues with direction of certain characters and plot do nothing to stop a beautiful film with amazing acting and a fervent fanbase which I would not be surprised to see turn on it after loving it. Joking, but the movie is very well done.
**EDIT - Originally had a typo that made the score 7.5, also removed some stuff that I think may not go down well with the whole non-spoiler thing.