Thursday, December 17, 2015

Film Review - Star Wars the Force Awakens (2015)

Star Wars the Force Awakens is the newest Star Wars film with JJ Abrams taking the helm instead of George Lucas, it has some new characters like Rey (Daisy Ridley), Finn (John Boyega) and Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) as well as bringing back the classic characters like Han Solo (Harrison Ford) and Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher.)

It is fair to say that of all the movies released this year this was the one I was the most nervous about because while I love and adore the original Star Wars movies (I hold them up as not only my personal favorite movies but as 3 of the greatest movies of all time) I hated the most recent prequel trilogy but the previews for this new movie as well as JJ taking over who has not made a genuine stinker of a film gave me hope again.

But despite that hope that one most fundamental question remained in my mind: How do you follow up 3 of the greatest movies of all time which broke so much new ground, something that even their own creator failed to do?

Sadly it seems it just cannot be done as this movie for me was disappointing and I say this with a pretty heavy heart (when I walked out of it yesterday I just couldn't say anything to anyone as I didn't want to tell them how I felt as it would ruin it for them) but before I delve into that in greater detail I want to talk about what I did like and that is Ridley and Boyega, they are great together in terms of their action, their dialogue and their chemistry it makes me want to see more of them in future movies.

Plus I did enjoy some of the visual and story references throughout the film they did make me smile at times.

But like I said the film for me was a disappointment and the main reason I feel this way is due to the storytelling presented here (I will not reveal much I promise you this) quite frankly I thought it was weak and really just nothing more than everything we've seen before in a Star Wars film (there's the lightsabers, the fighters, the bases, the officers) and given everything that we saw for me all of that just got tiresome after a while.

And the reason I feel that way is that it just feels like another one of those and they were done much better in the original 3 films where it felt wonderful and magical and real whereas here I just didn't feel those senses of magic and wonder after a while I began to see that digital feel to a lot of the film and a lot of its sections at times play out like remakes of the original Star Wars and Return of the Jedi.

But maybe all of this isn't the film itself but just me as I turned to the man sitting in the same row as me had tears in his eyes and when I saw that I thought to myself "This movie is not for me and I feel this is for that generation of fans that grew up with Star Wars in the late 70s to early 90s when they would've watched them either in the cinemas and/or on the CBS/Fox Video Collection."

But another feeling I had was that maybe that impact of seeing Star Wars for the first time again (I was 11 when I saw the original 3 films in 1997) is a feeling I've already had with the X-Men movies Bryan Singer has directed, the Hunger Games series and the Cornetto trilogy that Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg created so perhaps as a result I wasn't as susceptible to that feeling in the way others have but at least I can look forward to returning to Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters next year or indeed enjoy the return of Frieza from Dragon Ball Z so it's not a total loss.

And so that was my full review of Star Wars the Force Awakens, 2 out of 5.

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