After the release of “Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith”, we Star Wars fans just accepted the fact that the franchise had officially ended. We knew that there would always be cartoons, books, video games, and comics but we accepted that live action Star Wars movies were now a thing of the past. There would be no more chapters to add to the Skywalker saga and perhaps it was better that way. No one wanted another prequel situation, where Lucas promised for more than a decade he would make more films but didn’t. The Star Wars saga was now one with the force.
Unbeknownst to almost everyone, George Lucas was working on a sequel trilogy and had even started to get his cast in line. One key cast member was Mark Hamill who would once again play Luke Skywalker but would take on a more Obi-Wan Kenobi role training a young Jedi Padawan named Kira. This obviously changed by the time the movie started filming for a number of reasons but Lucas supposedly even had a finished script. Then Disney came along throwing around crazy money. George Lucas had been considering retiring and when Disney got wind of this, the mouse house offered Lucas a little over four billion dollars for Lucasfilms. George Lucas accepted the offer and the transition began with Lucas and Disney agreeing to apoint Kathleen Kennedy as the new head of Lucasfilms. Disney also received George Lucas’ script for Episode VII in the deal which they wasted no time in throwing away.
Disney didn’t trust George Lucas after the prequels received generally negative feedback. They wanted to make a film for the fans. They wanted to sell nostalgia. In a nut shell, they wanted to remake “A New Hope” but wrap it up like a sequel and hope no one noticed. Well, plenty of people did and it wasn’t exactly like it was a fact they were hiding. They even hired lifetime Star Wars nerd J.J. Abrams to direct the movie. No one really knew what a Disney Star Wars movie would be like. We were all a little scared but also incredibly excited to see what Force Awakens had in store for us.
The movie is set thirty years after “Return of the Jedi” and sees the galaxy has once again fell into turmoil. The Empire was destroyed but in it’s ashes, the First Order arose. The First Order is basically just the Empire with a different name, they even have the same stormtroopers and tie fighters and guns and so on (not much has changed). They are led by Kylo Ren who is a Darth Vader fan boy with a secret of his own. Kylo Ren is definitely one of the highlights of the film. His unhinged emo and spoiled brat personality seems very different from Darth Vader’s calm and reserved demeanor.
“Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens” largely ignores the legacy material which came before it. So any event that happened in a book or comic became non-canon. This was a wise decision in my book because so much has happened in the books that would be hard to go over in a single movie. They did borrow fairly heavily from the legends though.
The film stars Harrison Ford, Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, Adam Driver, Carrie Fisher, Oscar Isaac, Lupita Nyong’o, Andy Serkis, Anthony Daniels, Peter Mayhew, and a non speaking cameo from Mark Hamill. I like the new characters and Ridley, Boyega, and Driver are among the three best standouts. Harrison Ford is a delight as Han Solo, one of his greatest characters.
The film sets up a lot of interesting questions, or as Abrams describes them, mystery boxes. The only problem with these mystery boxes is that it passes the buck onto the next filmmaker so the success of that movie is tied into the success of this movie. John Williams once again scores this Star Wars film but it isn’t the best in the saga.
The new characters act as stand ins for the original characters. Rey is essentially the Luke for this trilogy. Han is the new Obi-Wan, Maz is the new Yoda, Poe is the new Han, Finn is the Leia of this franchise, BB-8 is the new C-3PO and R2-D2, and Ren is the new Vader.
The film rehashes a lot of aspects from the original Star Wars but if you are going to steal and sell it as nostalgia, you can’t beat Star Wars. The force really did awaken with this film.
Grade: A-
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