It is about to break every box office record in history. Star Wars in an almost 40-year franchise with seven movies in the can and marketing tie-ins that will set the standard for years to come. You simply have to see it even if it isn’t perfect. Enjoy.
Star Wars: The Force Awakens (Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, Adam Driver, Oscar Isaac, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher) – It only took J.J. Abrams $200 million-plus to mount the latest Star Wars effort. And that doesn’t count the multi-millions more spent on advertising that really isn’t needed. But Abrams, who directed two Star Trek films, one Mission Impossible movie and TV’s Lost, knows how to spend money as well as produce big, blockbuster films.
The Force Awakens is the seventh installment in the venerable Star Wars saga … and perhaps the most important one. It begins the third trilogy. The 1977 debut, Episode IV as we found out then, was a sensation. V and VI were sure things. Then, Star Wars creator George Lucas, who also directed the first of the series, decided not to create the second trilogy for almost 15 years. The second trilogy, of course, was a prequel – the first three episodes. But The Force Awakens starts the third trilogy, in effect the follow-up to one of the most popular movies of all time.
The critics love The Force Awakens. The audiences love The Force Awakens. It is a big, brash, technologically brilliant film. It is also a little long and a touch … wait for it … boring in the middle. But then it gets fun, exciting, and even thrilling.
Harrison Ford was convinced to leave Montana, get out of his helicopter, and do the sequel. They must have paid him a fortune. Ever since Lucas used him in American Graffiti, he became arguably the biggest star in the world. Carrie Fisher and Mark Hamill said yes, too. That clinched it.
Unless you have been stuck on the International Space Station, you know that Episode VII occurs about 30 years after we left Han, Luke, Leia, Chewy, C-3PO, and R2D2. The Force is gone but The First Order has taken over. Luke has disappeared and is supposedly training other Jedi warriors. Leia is now a general in the Resistance. And Han has been gallivanting around the galaxy in obscurity. We get new, young characters: (1) a “scavenger” named Rey (Daisy Ridley), a woman of considerable strength, guts, and character; (2) a young resistance pilot, Poe (Oscar Isaac); and (3) a stormtrooper, Finn (John Boyega), who doesn’t like what he sees from The New Order so he deserts.
They find the Millennium Falcon in the scrapheap to escape the bad guys, who are led by Kylo Ren (Adam Driver), whose back-story I won’t reveal. That is when they unite with Han and Chewy … and away they go.
The Force Awakens is a must-see, of course. It is not necessarily the best movie you will see this holiday season but it is certainly the biggest … and the most crowded. At $1 billion and trending up, it is likely to eclipse every box office record in history.
With a script by Abrams and Lawrence Kasdan, this film capitalizes on almost 40 years of existing fans and a bunch of kids who can’t wait to see the best animation and computer graphics money can buy for about a quarter-of-a-billion dollars. Enjoy.