Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)

I started a review for this film back in December after I first saw it, but with Star Wars Episode VII being by far the most anticipated movie of the year and carrying an immense amount of baggage and expectation, what I had hoped would be a quick little review quickly became unwieldy. Now about four months on and having seen the movie three times all together I think I can briefly summarize my thoughts on the film, The Force Awakens is a good, but not a great movie. There will be spoilers if you somehow have not seen this.

The Force Awakens is the start of a third Star Wars trilogy and its relationship to the previous two is important to understand, and not just in an 'in universe chronology sense', with this movie picking up about 30 years after the events of Return of the Jedi, but in the way the different popular receptions of the first two trilogies effects this movie as a finished product. The original 1977-1983 Star Wars trilogy is widely beloved in an almost religious way, while the prequel 1999-2005 trilogy not so much. The Force Awakens is the sequel to Jedi that fans have waited more then 30 years to see, and with the prequels being widely viewed as botched or unworthy the makers of this film wanted to do everything in their power to ensure that this film would strongly evoke the original films and downplay  association with the bad memories of Lucas's second batch of space opera. To do this the filmmakers not only blew up Coruscant with little feeling, in the ultimate f-you to Lucas's prequels which spent so much (too much) time on the capital of the Republic, but by assiduously avoiding risks.

Episode VII is essentially a remake of Episode IV, the original Star Wars film. It follows the first movie in plot, story beat, visuals, location, costume, mythology, character type, editing etc. so closely as to be a case of authorized plagiarism. That being said its still an enjoyable flick, its just different enough from the source material to work independently, but close enough to it to be comforting. I liked the new characters and enjoyed seeing the old ones, the action sequences and visual effects were most everything one could hope for, and there were enough little mysteries and cases of foreshadowing sprinkled throughout to give one hope that the coming films in this trilogy may be willing to take more risks then this movie did. So while I was with this movie most of the way it sure would have been nice if the dues ex machine was something other then another Death Star, and if the climatic scenes of the film weren't so very, very derivative. While this movie did not make me miss Lucas's prequels per say, it did make me appreciate the fact that Lucas wasn't content to just repeat himself, that he really did want to expand the scope and parameter of the universe he created, even if much of his efforts to do so fell short of being compelling.

Episode VII accomplished what both the suites at Disney and the fans evidently wanted, which was a new Star Wars movie as much like an old Star Wars movie as possible. The franchise has been reawakened, and lets hope now that its up going forward it can manage to evoke original trilogy Star Wars without repeating it. ***