Star Wars The Force Awakens - Full Movie

Movie Review:

Still, the film’s tilt toward nostalgia over novelty will barely prove a commercial liability; indeed, nothing at all short of a worldwide cataclysm (and even then, who knows) will probably keep Disney’s hugely anticipated Dec. 18 release from becoming the year’s top-grossing movie and possibly the most successful movie of all time, at least until the forthcoming episodes directed by Rian Johnson and Colin Trevorrow arrive. And if Abrams and his co-writers Lawrence Kasdan (back for more after “The Empire Strikes Back” and “Return of the Jedi”) and Michael Arndt have shouldered a near-impossible burden of audience expectations here, it’s hard not to look favorably upon “The Pressure Awakens” simply for being a massive improvement on “The Phantom Menace,” “Strike of the Clones” and everything but a small number of occasions in “Revenge of the Sith” - used jointly, a stultifying test in brand expansion gone awry, where Lucas’ much-vaunted technical wizardry and visible imagination demonstrated no match for the unholy torpor of his storytelling.

In comparison, “The Force Awakens” feels disarmingly swift and light on its feet, possessed of the comic sensibility that embraces modern wisecrackery and earnest humor in identical measure. Shot on 35mm film (and several 65mm Imax video footage), in a decisive refutation of Lucas’ all-digital visual, Abrams’ movie has grit under its fingernails and bloodstream in its veins, even as we see within an early battle sequence in which an Imperial Stormtrooper’s white helmet is all of a sudden streaked with red. A conflicted young warrior-slave who goes by the name of Finn (John Boyega), this Stormtrooper has been brainwashed into providing the First Order - a new army of galactic terrorists that arose from the ashes of the evil Empire, about three decades after the Battle of Endor. Doing battle with the First Order are the good men and women behind a rebel movement called the Resistance.

If all this sounds familiar, the similarities only continue from there. An ace Resistance pilot named Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac, solid in a minor role) is captured by the First Order, but not before concealing a top-secret map inside a small droid, which he sends away to a desert world. This time around, the droid is not R2-D2 but an orange-colored, spherical-bodied model called BB-8; the desert globe is not Tatooine but Jakku; the individual who adopts the droid is a hardcore young scavenger called Rey (Daisy Ridley); and the coveted information concerns the whereabouts of Luke Skywalker, the last of the Jedi knights, that has mysteriously eliminated lacking. Escaping the First Order with Poe’s help, the eager but good-hearted Finn crash-lands on Jakku, where he eventually companions with Rey - who helps it be quite clear that she’s in no need of rescuing, many thanks quite definitely - to ensure that BB-8’s intel helps it be back again to the Resistance.

Keeping barely one step prior to the enemy Link fighters on the tail, Rey and Finn have the ability to commandeer the dust-choked but ever-durable Millennium Falcon, resulting in a outrageous loop-de-loop chase scene where Rey actually is an exceptionally gifted pilot. Of course, where the Falcon is, Han Solo (Harrison Ford) cannot be too far behind, and after turning up to reclaim his old spaceship (“Chewie, we’re home”), he reluctantly joins causes with Rey, whose presence has begun setting off interested rumblings within the Push. For his or her part, Rey and Finn can’t believe they’re seeing Han Solo in the flesh, and it’s hard not to discern in the young actors’ expressions a completely unfeigned delight at sharing the screen with Ford in one of his most iconic roles.

“It’s true - the Force, the Jedi, all of it. It’s all true,” Han murmurs at one point, and he seems to be addressing not just his new friends but also the audience, and with the sort of soulful conviction capable of converting even the most jaded “Star Wars” skeptics into true believers once again. It’s that desire to transport the viewer - to return us to a wondrous, childlike condition of moviegoing innocence - that effectively models the pattern for nearly every following development in “The Push Awakens.” A lot of this is rather intuitive: It simply wouldn’t be classic “Celebrity Wars” if someone didn’t mutter “I've a bad sense concerning this,” or if audiences didn’t get an upgrade on the favorite gold-plated worrywart C-3PO (Anthony Daniels), his squat sidekick R2-D2, which fish-faced lover favorite Admiral Ackbar (Tim Rose). However the film’s most indelibly moving moments are reserved for Han and his estranged love, Leia (Carrie Fisher), no more a princess but a Level of resistance general. Their banter is raspier and gentler than it was 30 years back, less barbed and more bittersweet, and audiences can expect their hearts to swell to Mandallian proportions whenever the actors are on screen.

Abrams’ filmmaking has enough dynamism and sweep to zip us along for much of the fast-paced 135-minute running time, and for impressive stretches he achieves the action-packed buoyancy of the old Saturday morning serials that partly inspired “Star Wars” in the first place. At once polished and pleasingly rough-hewn, Dan Mindel’s lensing alternates between stately landscape compositions and nimble camera movements as the situation requires, while editors Maryann Brandon and Mary Jo Markey prove as attentive to the coherence of the action sequences as to the rhythm of the overall narrative, while making adroit use of the signature side-swiping picture transitions. And even in a series heavy with CGI and/or creature results - as when Finn and Rey are attacked by fearsome creatures with razor-sharp tooth and tentacles - the visuals never lapse into overkill. The unobtrusive sophistication of the visible results (supervised by Roger Guyett) is particularly apparent in moments offering the uber-villainous Supreme Leader Snoke (motion-capture maven Andy Serkis, resembling a plus-sized, more articulate Gollum), where it’s not readily obvious that we’re viewing a hologram.

Gone, happily, will be the prequels’ ADD-inducing history shots of spaceships zipping across a sterile cityscape like goldfish trapped in a giant screen saver. The different worlds we see here, from the parched desert vistas of Jakku to the verdant forests of the planet Yavin, feel vividly textured and inhabited (Rick Carter and Darren Gilford are credited with the production design). But the most crucial component of the movie’s design is undoubtedly John Williams’ still-enveloping score, from that thrilling, trumpet-like first blast over the opening text scroll, to the majestic flurries of feeling the music generates as it accompanies the characters on their long and difficult journeys.

At a certain point, however, “The Force Awakens” seems so established to fashion a modern echo of the initial trilogy it becomes almost too reverential - or riff-erential, given Abrams’ fondness for performing on recognizable tropes, themes and plot factors in his film and Television work. The Loss of life Celebrity that was ruined by the end of “Celebrity Wars” is one-upped here with a much larger, even more destructive weaponized planet (we even get to see the contrasting blueprints in detail). The Mos Eisley cantina meets its match in a watering hole run by a wizened old proprietress, Maz Kanata (Lupita Nyong’o, in motion-capture drag), who has some crucial wisdom about the Pressure to pass on to Rey. And in the story’s least persuasive development, the famous Oedipal dynamic that defined Luke and Darth Vader’s bond re-emerges unexpectedly here in even more toxic form - a twist that simply feels too contrived to achieve the desired impact.

Overall, the script leans rather heavily on exposition to complete the 30-calendar year gap between your events of the film and the ones of “Come back of the Jedi”; one longs to get right up to speed, however in subtler, less long-winded conditions. The movie’s multiple dark-side-of-the-Force types are also something of the mixed handbag. Serkis is okay however, not galvanizing as Snoke; Domhnall Gleeson has a few impressive snit matches as a petulant First Order general, with one open public conversation that’s shot to look very “Triumph of the Will”; and Gwendoline Christie is seen only in full armor as Finn’s ex-superior, Capt. Phasma, whose narrative function never really comes into focus. That leaves Adam Driver, solid very effectively against type as the silver-masked, dark-cloaked Kylo Ren, though it would be as unfair to say more about his role as it would be to disclose any particulars about when and where Mark Hamill’s Luke Skywalker turns up.

For that matter, even by film’s end there remains a frustrating if intentional degree of mystery surrounding Finn and Rey, both individuals charged with carrying the series forward, and whose backstories presumably will be fleshed out more satisfyingly in subsequent movies. Viewers willing to focus on might be found will have a field day analyzing the casting of the white feminine and a dark man as co-leads in the year’s biggest blockbuster - an audacious and honestly long-overdue corrective to the position quo, quite in addition to the truth that both actors are excellent. Boyega, so good in “Assault the Block,” brings sly wit to the role of a soldier grappling with a vaguely Jason Bourne-style problems of conscience. And Ridley, in a doozy of a breakout role, is great as a young female not yet sure what to label of the powerfully beckoning Drive, or of the glorious and terrifying destiny that may await her. She might not yet have the heroic stature of the Katniss Everdeen, but future films will surely show.

In the long run, “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” suggests the task of the filmmaker who faced the exciting yet unenviable task of partially reassembling one of the very most beloved ensembles in movie history, furthering their characters’ adventures in a meaningful fashion, and helping them pass the baton in one generation of action numbers to the next - and emerged with a compromise solution that, even when it’s not firing on all cylinders, has been put across with sufficient style, momentum, love and care to demonstrate irresistible to any who have ever considered themselves fans. Risking heresy, it’s well worth noting that Abrams actually did smarter, more inventive work on his 2009 reboot of “Celebrity Trek,” no doubt in part because he was working with a less greatly guarded business. “Celebrity Wars,” at once a ethnic juggernaut and a sacrosanct organization, resists any try to reimagine its landscaping too aggressively or imaginatively; which may be to the detriment of the diverting first work, but Abrams has more than stoked our expectation for what his successors may have up their sleeves.