Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
By Daniel Shultz
I’m a Star
Trek kind of person. I make no claim to being a rabid Star Wars fanatic, I
didn’t see the films as a young child, there was no life altering viewing, I
wasn’t forever changed by seeing Vader tell Luke he was his father, (as
that was common knowledge within pop culture at the time) and I didn’t get
crazy excited to see any of the prequels. I did see the prequels, the last one
in the theatre even. But even as a high school student I recognized that day
sitting in that theatre on opening weekend (for a friend’s birthday) that the
writing was terrible and the story dumb.
I say this
to make it known that Star Wars isn’t my favorite thing ever, but I do like the
original trilogy, I think they’re quality films. So going into this new Star Wars
film I had hope that I would be seeing a good movie, but my expectations were
kept at a minimum because of my non-fanboyness.
So is the
movie good? No. Its great. It is a great Star Wars film. It’s not as good as the
originals, and is light-years better than the prequels. It isn’t Citizen Kane
or anything. (side note I don’t think Citizen Kane is the greatest film ever
made, but it is short hand for such a statement.) It gets the job done. There
is action, believable characters, actual character development, tense moments,
tears, laughs, everything you’d want from a Star Wars film.
It has its
flaws of course. It leaves no, absolutely ZERO, time to breathe, there are no
quiet moments in this film. Every moment has a sense of tension and looming
disaster. The characters seem to spend the majority of their time running.
Running away from bad guys, running towards bad guys, every single moment seems
to be sprinting to the next scene. This can be blamed on the general trend
of modern filmmaking, which seems to
require that if a character actually is standing still that the camera zooms
around them in an epic style. One need only look at Star Wars The Force Awakens
Director JJ Abrams previous work on the Star Trek franchise, which feature
loads of running and no quiet moments or scenes where the characters take their
time to figure out a solution to their problem.
Fortunately
Star Wars doesn’t suffer quite as bad from the lack of quiet scenes. It is Star
Wars after all, not Star Trek. There is no need for it to have detailed
explanations for its science or to have philosophical conversations about the rights
of droids. So Star Wars manages to come out of this trend with a few scratches
but well intact.
The plot is
simple and I won’t relay it here. There are few surprises that people will no doubt see coming, but what does happen is nonetheless impactful. People learn lessons,
they develop and change, they grow into stronger people.
Overall the
acting is good, the new faces bring energy and skill to their parts. It's good
to see that a film doesn’t have to have famous names in the lead roles to make it
profitable. The returning actors bring familiarity and gravitas to their roles
that helps bridge the gap between the old and new.
This is a great film. You should see
it.
4/5 Stars
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