Star Wars Episode 7
Finally saw it. It’s a bit mixed.
Firstly, the good parts.
The new cast – Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, Oscar Isaac, Adam Driver and others – all perform their parts wonderfully. They are backed up wonderfully by the returning cast members (Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher, amongst others).
JJ Abrams has done a sincere job, and a difficult one at that, at staying true to the Star Wars saga. He has managed to make a new generation of aliens/tech/battles/characters, while keeping previous elements from the other films present.
All the VFX are excellently done, a stunning blend of practical and CGI.
John Williams’ music is perhaps the best part of this film. His score is enchanting as ever, and he is able to reinvent classic scores in a new and original manner; I didn’t find anything over-repetitive.
The story, now, that’s where things get tricky.
Star Wars has never been one for subtlety: it’s a full-blown space opera with emphasis on the “opera” part: the story and characters get seriously cheesy and hammy at times that it’s on the edge of spoiling itself; Harrison Ford reportedly said that Lucas could write a good story but the dialogue was lousy. But none of that matters, since this is still an epic space opera: even if parts of it can get repetitive and over-the-top at times it’s still a great adventure and entertains us with an emotional rollercoaster. Who didn’t cry when Han was encased in carbonite? Who didn’t cheer when Darth Vader saved his son?
Still, there were parts of it that didn’t work out to my mind:
- I thought the Resistance would work on rebuilding the Republic and returning the Jedi, they defeated the Empire and the Sith and they just leave things?
- WTF, Luke Skywalker vanished? And then he appears in the last scene of the film? Come on! This is subjective I suppose, but I thought Luke Skywalker deserved equal/more screentime than Han Solo. To make him a freaking book-end in this, mentioned at only the start/close of the film, strikes me as a disgrace to one of cinema’s greatest heroes. However, judging from Rey’s vision it looks to me like he is in a constant battle between the light and dark side of the Force, so I hope that will be looked at in the future.
- There is no way a piece of a map could confound the Resistance AND the First Order, especially when each side should logically have enough geographical information to work details out. Or at least have enough people to comb the known galaxy to track him down.
- the Starkiller weapon is basically the Death Star a hundred times larger. They could only outdo the Death Star by a bigger version?
- The RAID guys didn’t do any martial arts. What was the point of casting them then?
- We saw too much of Kylo Ren. Darth Vader started out a simple villain and then his backstory and connection to Luke were revealed in a shocking twist and exposition. Here, we already have a general picture of Ren: a Force user twisted by the Dark Side, desperate and conflicted and having serious inferiority issues. He is desperate to find Luke his mentor, and desperate to kill Rey for being strong enough to resist him. At times he comes off a whinier version of Vader, and nothing like how the previous Sith were portrayed.
Snoke is not so better either: he looks like a giant bald Palpatine without the hood. But I thought he was much more formidable than Kylo.
And aren’t they Sith? Why not just mention that they are Sith? They’re the classic counterparts to the Jedi, there wouldn’t be anything wrong with mentioning so.
- Han Solo, smuggler and adventurer, deserved better than a stab through the heart by his son. Harrison Ford said he thought the character should die, and I thought his story arc in this film (an old gunslinger back in the saddle for one more ride) was nicely done, but still, he’s Han Solo the adventurer, not Jonathan Kent with a bad son. He deserved a blaze of glory at least.
- Finn can use a lightsaber? He has the Force too? Hopefully this can get looked at too.
- R2D2 woke up very coincidentally, after being asleep throughout the film.
- The film is left open to be continued in a sequel. The other films at least kept themselves self-contained and had an epilogue of sorts done. This was just a means to keep viewers informed of a sequel, and a Star Wars Cinematic Universe, a trend that is now starting to become weary and overdone.
JJ Abrams was chosen for his work on updating Star Trek for a new generation. But while he could use a soft reboot with the changing of history, with Star Wars he has to continue a legacy of delivering epic space battles and drama (like previous directors Irvin Kershner and Richard Marquand). And I believe he’s only done an okay job at it.
But on the whole, I found it the film all right, sort of between fellow openers TPM (which was average) and ANH (which was good). I can only hope that the next film will be better than this one.
07/08/06... 786... the sentinel of Allah has arrived.