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STAR WARS EPISODE VII: THE FORCE AWAKENS released on DVD/Blu-ray last week, and the marketing hype and fan hysteria have died down enough that I could finally re-watch the film and review it for the cinema that it is, not the marketing juggernaut that it was so carefully crafted and designed by The Mouse’s committee to be (so, seen Disneyland lately?). Now, seriously, it’s taken me a while to truly collect my thoughts on this film, which still feels alternately fresh and a little unreal, haunting, even, to me. The night I first saw it at the theater only a few months ago anyway, fully made up of hardcore, anxiously awaiting STAR WARS fans, some of whom, frighteningly, looked to be even more hardcore about it than even me, we were enraptured and entranced by its high flying action, fast pace, winning performances and excellent humor (one of the brand’s most often overlooked ingredients). It was pure shock and awe and some of the most fun we’d had at the movies in some time! My friend Patrick texted me the next day, “Above and beyond expectations! I’m speechless!” he wrote. Exactly how I’d felt about it throughout the night and most of that next day. But then I knew I was going to have to review the film for this blog, and that meant that I was going to have to think about it remove my biases and think objectively. Think deeply. Search my feelings. So, for the sake of full disclosure, let’s be absolutely clear here: I’m as hardcore STAR WARS pencil-necked, geek-ass, nerdgasm fanboy as they get. It’s because of STAR WARS that I write. It’s because of STAR WARS that I’m a sci-fi nut. It’s because of STAR WARS that I love movies - correction: cinema verité - and not just sci-fi but all the world’s cinema (yes I have French, German, Swedish, Chinese, Russian and Japanese cinema in my DVD collections and I watch them with subtitles. Your welcome). It’s because of STAR WARS that I began reading books, and in becoming literate, went on to read diversified authors such as Philip K. Dick, Isaac Asimov, Norman Mailer, Ian Fleming, Irvine Welsh and (best of all) Leslie Charteris! It’s even because of STAR WARS that I began watching the late greats Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, back when their show was still called “Sneak Previews” and played on PBS! Between them and various editions of Consumer Guide’s Rating the Movies series of books, I began to learn what makes great cinema – and STAR WARS was the pinnacle of great cinema or at least I think so! So, I collect -–well a lot of things - but one of the things I collect the most of is (you guessed it) STAR WARS merchandise! Until recently I had collected most of the action figures and vehicles (should the quality pick up I might buy into them again, but depending on their reasonable pricing, which currently, is a major issue). I collected the earlier Bantam novels (more for the Drew Struzan cover art as opposed to the awkward, often humorless stories inside). I collected some of the best of the Dark Horse Comics trade paperbacks (Tales of the Jedi, Knights of the Old Republic, X-Wing: Rogue Squadron and Legacy, to be specific, but also some other assorted titles). I even collected and played some of the best of the computer games (KOTOR I & II, Jedi Academy, Jedi Outcast, and dare I say it, Force Unleashed I & II). My most prized of all of my STAR WARS collecting are the roleplaying games. How can I resist the mechanics and the source materials that give me the opportunity to create my own STAR WARS characters and tell my own stories in My Very Own Version of the STAR WARS universe? But STAR WARS in many ways, is also a nebulous thing, so much more than just a single movie or even a single movie series; so much more, even, than just a brand or a franchise. It is like a black hole in space, so massive that its own gravity well pulls in all things - not even light can escape it - and around which all else revolves, resting precariously just outside of its event horizon and slowly lilting towards their inevitable, fatal falls. STAR WARS is exactly that massive and that powerful. Don’t believe me? Look at the Box Office numbers of The Force Awakens! Two billion. That’s NOT just because Disney hyped the shit out of it and merchandised it to death! I mean, seriously…car mats at the local Pep Boys! To wit, there was not much in cinema that was much anything like STAR WARS before. There had been JAWS, which I loved in many ways for exactly the same reasons as STAR WARS. Both are built up of equal parts adventure, horror, humor, character study, etc. There was not much in cinema that was like STAR WARS after. There had been Raiders of the Lost Ark; once more it has some of the same ingredients, is also a rapid-fire paced film that is very funny in spite of heaping doses of gore and violence; it’s just the dressings that are a little different. Just imagine the mind blowing delight in my 12 year old mind when I realized that ROTLA (which I only wanted to see because Han Solo was in it!) was from the director of JAWS (Steven Spielberg), the producer and creator of STAR WARS (George Lucas who also wrote the story for ROTLA) and which featured a music score by master maestro John Williams of both previous films! For further example there is the book STAR WARS and History, which examines the world history, cultures and myths that George Lucas drew upon as inspiration for events in six of the Star Wars episodes that he wrote (among many other such inspirations as Robin Hood and Flash Gordon). There is the countless imitation films, including the original Battlestar Galactica TV show, which Lucas even took to court; there is the other legal battles Lucas had to endure, such as the case against the lewd, crude rap group called Luke Skywalker and the Get Fresh Crew; and Lucas even had to battle against the U.S. government for describing it’s missile defense platforms as “the Star Wars missile defense system”! The Vatican -–the freakin’ Vatican - has written papers about STAR WARS! Most recently, Secretary of State and Democratic Presidential nomination hopeful Hillary Clinton used the famous lexicon, “May the Force be With You” as a debate closer! Like I said it’s ... JUST. THAT. BIG. Now, before I get into my feelings, my true feelings, about the new movie, let me say a few things about the old movies. I have to say this because you need to know where I’m coming at this review from. I cannot possibly add more to the classic trilogy than has already been written (except to say that, compared with the Shakespearean gravitas of Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi plays like just a really cool episode of “The A-Team”!). Very specifically, I need to talk to you all - and implore you all to remain civilized - I must talk about the prequels! Yes, those much maligned and dreaded prequels! Well, guess what I loved them! To this day I’ve staunchly defended them (well, not Attack of the Clones so much). No, The Phantom Menace wasn’t a four-star milestone of cinema, but, once expectations are lowered (all I really wanted out of it was that it be a better film than Jedi, and, IMHO, it is just so) it was not the clunker most internet whiners claimed it was. Claims of it having plot holes proved to be false (or at least no worse than any other movie), and the dialogue was merely proven to be STAR WARS dialogue as opposed to bad dialogue (power converters, anyone?). The performances? Liam Neeson is as good as Neeson always is, Ewan MacGregor excellent as Obi Wan. Natalie Portman was hired to play a bottled up diplomat and acted the living hell out of a bottled up diplomat and was unfairly shredded for it. Jake Lloyd? Look the kid was just eight, okay? And he’s supposed to be awkward and weird; he’s a fatherless slave that eventually grows into Darth Vader! And for every one Jar-Jar, or Boss Nass, there was the quite cool Captain Tarpaulis, the nefarious pod racer Sebulba or the excellently digitally realized Watto the junk dealer. Just try and convince me the scenes between Qui Gonn and Watto aren’t awesome! (So, no, I didn’t like Jar Jar any more than anyone else did, but he really isn’t in the film that much, and history shows, the young tykes liked him just enough. Even I did find him to be genuinely funny in at least two or three instances. And who, the ghetto Autobot twins of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen were so much better?)! And what hardcore fan didn’t laugh their ass off when they saw the Sandpeople of Tatooine taking potshots at the passing pod racers? DARTH MAUL!!! Heck, folk, let’s just admit it - this movie’s freakin’ awesome! (Yeah, it sucked that Maul died so easily but that was to show that all of Palpatine’s henchmen before were never going to be as good as Darth Vader!). Maybe the Senate stuff wasn’t exciting, but I wasn’t bored with it either; it sets up the context of the entire universe that these movies take place in and flows beautifully with everything we knew about Palpatine’s rise to power from previous sources. If nothing else The Phantom Menace was very successful in exactly what it was trying to accomplish: millions of new fans were dazzled by the resplendent alien vistas and weirded out alien physiologies (much more believable than the crickets and wolfmen aliens of the Mos Eisley cantina, that’s for sure); the sleeker, cleaner ships that suggested the Republic at its economic height (ditto the bustling and busy core world of Coruscant), and the carefully crafted, multi-layered storyline that showcased the galaxy’s social, economic and political maneuverings and the accidental discovery of a fated, talented youth (sound familiar?). I won’t need to go into Attack of the Clones so much, because I’m very much in line with most people on this one (although, don’t kill me, I still like it). There’s still a lot of great stuff in it: Jango vs. Obi Wan (in the rain AND in space!); Jango vs. Mace Windu; the Arena, Anakin going wookieshit all over the sandpeople and admitting his wickedness to Padme, the action packed last forty minutes especially. The pacing is off in the earliest scenes and that wretched romance between Padme and Anakin…- I can and sometimes even do defend that as being of “awkward by design; hence why their relationship failed and Anakin goes to the dark side.” But even the DVD revealed that there were actually better scenes cut out of the movie than a lot that was left in it. Still, is it really so bad? Would you rather be watching this, or Chronicles of Riddick? Big Momma’s House 2, anyone? Revenge of the Sith; yes, there were still some issues, but they are very much more minor (yeah, the Vader-shout; what was that about? And that terrible exposition about Qui Gonn!). But let’s face it; 98% of this movie still ROCKS! And that means the only STAR WARS movies that it’s not better than are the original and The Empire Strikes Back (because, what CAN be better than that? Nothing. No seriously, check the UK’s cinephile magazine Empire and their 500 greatest movies of all-time list, voted online by fans. Go ahead. I’ll wait). I am happy to find myself in conversations with many younger people who tell me they like the Prequel Trilogy better than the Classic Trilogy. They find the visuals to be better, at least in regards to the aliens and locations. Some find they like the multi-tracked, multi-character stories to have been much better, although others admit they like the more personal conflict of Luke Skywalker better than Anakin Skywalker. One young coworker of mine said he likes the Classic Trilogy better, but wished they had the special effects technology of today available back then. Even I told him they wouldn’t have been the same films, though, just as the Dark Horse Comics graphic novel of The Star Wars shows us. It was based on George Lucas’ first draft screenplay and is vastly different, much more prequel-like in tone and scale. Now, at long last, The Force Awakens. So come back in a month and read part 2 of my article to find out…... oh wait, no! Sorry, just couldn’t help myself! Like I said at the start, I was dazzled! I loved it! But there were little issues, as most movies have (there can never be such a thing as a perfect movie, because, by the convention of narrative, certain things have to happen to advance the plot; these being things that are in no way realistic and only ever happen in fiction). These little issues were easy to digest on first viewing because the movie was so dang fast paced, funny and, appropriately swashing my buckle, it refused to give me any time to think. As my mind percolated, these little things kept getting bigger. And bigger. And like Starkiller Base in the film itself, biggest. Our problems begin with the character that I was, actually, most looking forward to, Finn (John Boyega, perfectly cast). While it’s not hard to believe that he would come to his senses and realize that he’s fighting on the wrong side of galactic history (then again, considering this universe’s prior histories, evil seems to rule the space lanes for pretty much most of it) it’s somewhat hard to believe he came to his senses while on his first mission! And after a lifetime of indoctrination? (That’s a point that is not even made until much later in the film, and when it comes up, only drives home further how little sense it makes)! Surely it would have been better to explain that, even so young, he was already battle hardened and was just tired of so much senseless slaughter? Serving his masters would not only have been more important than moral objections, but certainly more important than even his own life! If Finn gained his moral conscious through an act of the Force, it doesn’t show in this episode – he didn’t display any force sensitivity anywhere throughout the rest of the film, and even goes down in a lightsaber fight. Further confounding his character is a revelation that, at Starkiller Base, his duties were that of a sanitation worker. For this he was gifted with important tactical details about the planet’s shields, defenses, and primary weaknesses? Background issues aside, I liked Finn as a character, thanks to the charismatic performance by Boyega (but he’s certainly much better in Attack the Block, a criminally under seen British monster/sci-fi hybrid film). Even better, to be certain, is the film’s central heroine, Rey, played with a wonderful, star-in-the-making performance by the young Daisy Ridley. On the one hand, I’m very happy to be able type “central heroine” in that sentence; on the other hand, her character is a total Mary Sue! [A “Mary Sue” is a fan term, ironically born out of Star Trek fan-fiction, referring to a multitude of similar-same characters written largely by female fans in which the central character turns out to be a mere avatar of the author herself; so dazzling in modestly concealed beauty that usually both Spock and Kirk swoon over her and the moment there is a crisis that threatens the ship/the universe/all lives/whatever, Mary Sue -–surprise, surprise -– saves the day]! I wouldn’t be pointing such an accusing finger at Rey if she didn’t just happen to be able to speak both droid and wookie despite an isolationist existence as a scavenger; other fans widely criticized her staff fighting and all too quickly adept force powers and–those I am completely fine with (she would have needed some athletic skills to get by)! As seen in the film her piloting skills weren’t quite there to start but she got the hang of it, it’s just that she shouldn’t have had any piloting skills or she could have left Jakku ages ago; maybe we can still write this one off because she did pilot her own speeder bike and so maybe the control scheme of the Millennium Falcon just wasn’t all that different? Yeah, I admit it’s something of a stretch, but I’ll take it. Kylo Ren; our fearsome new and young villain. Wow! Just wow! His character is literally just a new Anakin Skywalker-type, minus the sprawling backstory (so, will there be “interquels”?). But he does get to show off an intensity and propensity towards violence that Hayden Christiansen was forced to hold back from until the final scenes of Revenge of the Sith. But Driver is also afforded other acting freedoms, particular in vocalization of dialogue, in scenes that most movie villains only get to dream of! Han Solo - err, excuse me - Harrison Ford and Chewbacca show up, and for the next hour, everything is awesome! Cue the LEGO movie soundtrack! Well, okay, for the sake of objectivity, maybe there’s some minor issues there, too. Chewbacca hasn’t aged at all? Because they know they can replace Peter Mayhew when the time comes (hopefully not soon) and keep Chewie around forever? And who trimmed the wookie’s hair? Does he just stand there and let Luke lop it off with some Jedi lightsaber moves? I can believe that Han Solo found the Falcon again at that point, he’d been looking for it, for at least I presume two decades or so; other scenes in the movie make it clear that tracking ships is now easier than it used to be in the classic era. So he probably had a good idea of at least the star system it was in, or maybe even knew it was somewhere on Jakku, but was still narrowing down which region. But I would like to have known how he got boarded by two opposing groups of space pirates (they just kinda’ pop out of nowhere) without any active defenses or alarms systems? Rey and Finn, I suppose I should explain - I just presume most people reading this have seen the movie by now - are looking for Luke Skywalker, and with them is the droid BB-8, a clever little beach ball of a robot design that is all the rage at your local Best Buy. Han takes them all to see Maz Kanata, an alien mystic who it turns out, has been holding onto Luke’s long lost lightsaber (yes, the one that was originally Anakin’s, who, as Darth Vader, lopped off Luke’s said lightsaber clutching hand at Bespin). Err, um…say, WHAT? So if she and Han are buddies from way back why didn’t she give it to him long ago? (Much had been made of Lupita Nyong’o having been cast as Kanata – it’s not at all a bad performance - but there’s nothing special about it either. As far as diversity goes it’s no accomplishment since she’s doing only voice and motion capture for this character, who is very minor anyway. And Whoopi Goldberg already had this territory covered in the STAR TREK franchise three decades ago)! As for two of the other highly touted, highly marketed, highly action figure-centric new characters - Poe Daemeron and Captain Phasma -– uh ... better luck next time! Princess Leia arrives, still played by the increasingly daffy Carrie Fisher. She is tender in spots, but her dialogue is mostly mush and contributes absolutely nothing to the overall story (not even any exposition about the state of the government she presumably helped form!). She even manages to suck some of the air out of one best performances Ford has given us in decades! But then the First Order, our criminally underdeveloped chief bad guys (Domhall Gleason’s First Order officer Hux may as well have been named General Bahd Guiy) calls for the stupidest rally in the history of film, to fire the singular stupidest weapon in the history of science fiction (yes, I know this is a space opera fantasy – but that’s not the part of it that is supposed to be a fantasy)! And I can say that with a level of authority: I read Transformers comics for Buddha’s sakes! Even the Star Forge from the KOTOR game wasn’t this stupid! No amount of Jar Jar’s and Ewoks are this stupid (we know this because in the real world, we run into hundreds of stupid, annoying people all the time, so that’s just an element of realism)! Nothing even in the entirety of the prequels was this stupid! I won’t even tell you what our big stupid superweapon allegedly destroys, because it doesn’t really make any sense either and no sci-fi writer worth his salt should have put this in the screenplay, however well visualized it all is on film. Seriously folks, although this is a brief sequence in the film, this is on the level of William Shatner directed STAR TREK stupid (and even then, I don’t know)! Reportedly, stalwart sci-fi writer Alan Dean Foster tries to develop this weapon better in the novelization (he also novelized the original as a ghost writer for George Lucas) and even he couldn’t make it any more credible! Physicist Neil DeGrasse-Tyson irked some fans by breaking down its physical impossibilities, but really, he needn’t have bothered. We all know: It’s Fucking Stupid and should never have been in this film! For all of the bally-hoo from both fans and professional critics alike about this film being a mere remake of the original 1977 Star Wars (I refuse to call that A New Hope) what follows from here is really a mish-mash of both Empire and Jedi. Han Solo’s fate is inevitable to anyone who knows the movie business, but, I don’t feel the need to flatly ruin it for anyone going into the movie cold (yes, of course he says, “I have a bad feeling about this," at some point!). I will say that, for as telegraphed as it all is, I’ve pretty much known it since the movie was even announced (all signs pointed go), yet, it still emotionally resonated with me. For one thing, Harrison Ford went the extra mile here, despite my earlier jab at him. He truly found the skin and soul of this character once more, something I never thought he’d do again, because he hadn’t done it since The Empire Strikes Back (even harsher critics than me called his performance in Return of the Jedi, “Ward Cleaver on Quaaludes!”). He also spent the 90’s trashing the character to the press, and that karma came right back at him: during the filming of this movie the Millennium Falcon’s hydraulic door crashed down and broke his foot! Its okay, I happen to know Ford was well paid for this! But his performance here is the best I’ve seen from him in years, and as noted I’m a lifelong fan (heck, I even liked The Frisco Kid!). I may be one of the few fans that liked 2008’s Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and I think he’s even better here than he was in that! If there’s any true anchor that overrides all other weaknesses in this film, it’s him - and I haven’t even touched on how inconsistently the Force is presented in this film or, how this film’s meekly conceived backstory nullifies our heroes’ lives with misery upon misery! All of that backstory, despite the existence of the once (far better) expanded universe, will now be told and elaborated on with countless more novels, comics, and videogames, all of which will probably then be contradicted by the further planned films, and so on. Perhaps the biggest failure with The Force Awakens, as I see it, is the lack of a morality tale that it should have given to the millions upon millions of kids who will now see it as their first STAR WARS film. Yes, Rey and Finn are obviously good and the Evil Space Nazi’s are clearly bad (boy is it ever so lazily pounded into our heads by director J.J. Abrams - does he think we’re all just stupid?). But this movie never examines any of the hero’s moral choices; not even the rascally, literally grey-as-ever Han Solo, who now admits that he knows the Force, the Jedi, and the dark side are all real and tangible things! No one I can remember in this movie even really explains what the Force is and how it has a dark side. And Lucas’ entire prequel oeuvre was nothing if not dedicated to illustrating the differences, and the dangers of, good and evil mixing it up together. Now, you read what I did with the prequels there? That’s what we call a vigorous defense. It’s a lot easier to give that defense to films that may have been, at worst, a little action static and stiffly acted at times. Did anyone, though, perhaps consider they were made that way deliberately, so that people watching these films in order will see the saga becoming more exciting as it builds towards episodes V & VI? Poof - minds blown! And I can certainly say this: the prequels never once insulted my intelligence (well okay, maybe midichlorians - but Lucas was exploring a currently developing actual scientific theory there. On the other hand, so was Eon Productions when they gave James Bond an invisible car! Your move, internet!). Once you accept that the technology of this fictional universe is possible at all, at least George Lucas presented it with internal consistency. And maybe I’m just older and crankier, or just love literate storytelling so much more than mere special effects bamboozlement (if that were the case I’d be very excited about Independence Day 2 –... hell, the next Sharknado installment has me more excited than ID4.2), but I find it a lot harder to give a vigorous defense to The Force Awakens, rather than the prequels. Seriously, Attack of the Clones bumped up a notch in my rankings of these films! And all of that was relevant, why, you ask? Seth Abramson, an English Professor writing for the Huffington Post, wrote an article, “40 Unforgivable Plot Holes in The Force Awakens”. Well of course I wanted to come to TFA’s aide and give it my best “vigorous defense”! Even when I’m being most critical against anything STAR WARS, I’m still also its best “vigorous defense” guy! Scanning over his list, I could see that he brought up all of the problems I have already identified, plus many more, quite serious issues I had yet to consider. At least 10 of his items were less “plot holes” and more “coincidences” (like Han and Chewie finding the Falcon right at that moment, which, I’ve obviously already covered in some fashion). Still, I could only knock off about ten more things off Abramson’s list even in my best defense, and that left at least half of his points quite valid (e.g. why did the scavenger who found BB-8 give it up so easily to Rey knowing it would have been so valuable? - I can already answer that: she would have pummeled him with her quarterstaff built of lightsaber hilts; she already had a reputation as a pretty scrappy fighter). But then, how did Rey know how to communicate with this “one of a kind” droid? I considered reprinting his article verbatim and going through them one by one, but this is already a pretty wordy article! Abramson, who admits that he actually loved the film, (but that it just makes no sense, and yes, he’s correct) later identified 20 more in a follow up article, then yet again wrote another (and much less convincing) article declaring TFA the best STAR WARS movie of them all! And now, at long last, I finally have to rate this movie: The high points: - The casting, even more so than the actual characters they are playing. Certainly a big hooray for the return of the Classic Trilogy cast, even though we have to wait for (hopefully) Episode VIII for the return of Billy Dee Williams, as well as the true return of Mark Hamill. Ÿ- The musical score: seriously, if you all haven’t bought the John Williams conducted soundtrack of this movie then you are just sad and soulless people and I can do nothing for you – you deserve to be kicked in your nards and left whimpering in a grimy alley! Might well be the illustrious maestro’s best score ever! Ÿ - Kylo Ren: this is a true movie villain, one of the best I’ve seen since Javier Bardem in Skyfall (err, hey, sorry Christoph Waltz!). It’s not that Ren’s meager motivations are really that interesting, but the film itself sets up so much more to learn about him, and one only need to look to SNL’s “Undercover Boss: Starkiller Base Edition” to realize how good Adam Driver is in the role! Ÿ - Han and Chewie: it’s all too easy for naysayers to whine about how they were really the only good things in this movie. Just seeing them in the preview felt like reuniting with old friends! Ÿ - The action: there is certainly PLENTY of it, and it’s mostly all incredible! Ÿ - The final reveal of the plot’s crux: the force is strong in this one! Unfortunately, the all too heavy and important low points: -Ÿ The setting: Is there ever a film that failed so dramatically to fill us in on how things happened to get this way? So Luke’s students were murdered and he had to go into hiding, but how the hell did the First Order come to rule the galaxy just because Luke went into hiding? Surely the New Republic’s militant force was larger and well-armed – that’s why there’s a separate Resistance establishment – and this same movie even makes it clear that the Republic government was spread out over an entire star system, not just the one planet of Coruscant like in all the other fiction. Just how did the Republic not notice the terraforming of an entire planet into an impossible sun sucking super weapon with the ability to destroy an entire star system in one shot and not move in to destroy it before they finished building it? After all, the Resistance had no trouble destroying it pretty easily! Ÿ- The characters: I’ve already touched this, but, for as much as I love John Boyega, Finn, as a character, was a total let-down. First up is that he actually sets black people back by almost a millennium! As with our beloved Lando, Finn appears to be the only black person currently alive in the entire galaxy. And wouldn’t you know he just happens to be a slave? And wouldn’t you know, he just happens to have been a garbage man, rather than the bad-ass stormtrooper he was supposed to have been conditioned since childhood to be? And then while he’s trying to heroically save the white girl it’s actually him who is bumbling about comically? And wouldn’t you know he gets “the sidekick” treatment by being curiously absent for the climax? It’s certainly not Boyega’s fault; he manages to bring so much more to the character than what is on the screenplay’s pages - for all the talk about progressive casting choices, once more, STAR TREK is just far, far superior in this regard. Ÿ- The storyline: It’s pretty much all over the place, often without rhyme or reason. It seems they made a deliberate choice to avoid exposition, but some could have seriously helped this movie. Now, honestly, that is the way to start such a weird-universe space opera, as Lucas did so well in both the original and TPM, but here it goes over the course of the entire film, e.g. no mention of Starkiller Base until it’s time to fire it up, the lack of an explanation of The Force and how it works (even being presented inconsistently in this film). Pretty much everything about Maz Kanata makes little sense. With the exception of the humor the dialogue is all banal and forgettable. All of the character’s lives are wrought with misery upon misery – wasn’t this supposed to be a fun universe to live in? Ÿ- Lack of imagination: I know it’s supposed to be a call back to the originals, but where is all the environmental eye-candy that made the other films and shows so wondrous to look at over and over again? The new planets introduced aren’t remarkable (save the wreckage of the Empire on Jakku) but both Kanata’s world and Starkiller Base are merely glossed over. Alien species design is excellent in this film but everything else is just a reuse of original series elements. One look at the book The Art of Star Wars: The Force Awakens is a painful reminder of the much better film this should have been! So, all in all, I enjoyed The Force Awakens, warts and all, but as we have now seen it’s a pretty even split I just didn’t love it as I should have. I can’t even count how many STAR WARS books, comics, games (both P&P RPG’s and videogames) and shows (even the 80’s “Droids” cartoon!) that I like so much more than this particular film. I wanted to enjoy it so much more, and perhaps with repeated scrutiny I even might (my opinions of the prequels were all built on multiple DVD viewings, so…maybe). Luckily, we now know its just part of a series, and for all the hype, it was “just” another episode and the next two installments are already in production; so just like any other series, I guess, they can’t all be golden.
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