Almost a year ago, there was a bit of hullabaloo over a movie that was coming out.  You may have heard of it, a little thing called Star Wars: The Force Awakens.  You may have even gone to see it, I heard it was kinda popular.  Wouldn't you know it?  Between work and just being me, I never did see it.  Yup, that's right, Wonderduck, the old Star Wars fan from waaaaay the hell back, he never saw the new film.  Thanks to a free movie weekend on one of them premium stations on my satellite dish, however, I have rectified that problem.

Imagine my surprise when I realized I had seen it already!  Oh, at the time it was just called "Star Wars", and it was 1977, but SW:TFA is about as blatant a copy of that first movie as you're ever going to see. 

I'm not complaining.  The first English words spoken in the film are "This will begin to make things right," and if those aren't a shot across the bows of the three prequels, it's only because the shot actually hit.  Director JJ Abrams set out to put the magic back into the franchise, and the best way to do that is to make people forget about the bad movies.  What better way to do that than to take what worked and do it better?

For all that the film has been out for a year, I had managed to avoid all but the most basic spoilers... mainly the things from the trailers.  That took some doing, let me tell you.  But oh so worth it.  The scene from the trailers when the Millennium Falcon goes into combat with some TIE fighters at low altitude?  I knew something was coming, but I didn't expect it to put a gigantic grin on my face the way it did. 

When it's action time, the film delivers in spades.  Modernized X-Wings fight updated TIE fighters, lightsaber duels, Han Solo using a bowcaster, there's even a trench run as another nod to the original movie.  Really, there's so many hat tips to the original trilogy it's impossible to see them all on one viewing... which is one of many reasons I'm glad SW:TFA is on my DVR.  But as with all good films, you're not here for the action.  You're here because of the characters...

The only thing that could have ruined the movie faster than having George Lucas involved would have been if the new characters didn't work.  Fortunately for everybody, they do... mostly.  What few fails the movie has involves them and their oh-so-witty banter.  There are moments where I wanted to curse the name of Joss Whedon for making the "overly cool snark" school of dialogue popular, even though he has nothing to do with SW:TFA.  Nothing directly, at least, but some points in the script are pretty much lifted straight from Buffy or Firefly, and when that occurs, it doesn't fit quite right.  Even if you didn't know it in advance, it's pretty obvious that this is the first film of a series though, because we don't learn diddly-poo about backstories of any of' 'em.  Except for Finn, the ex-Stormtrooper, we learn his entire life story.  Not hard to do when a life story is "taken from family as a child, trained to be a Stormtrooper since then."  Rey, the nominal lead?  Well... um... she was left on a planet bysomeone, and has lived there all her life waiting for them to come back.   Poe, the Resistance's hottest pilot?  That's about it, really.  But there's still time to learn about them, and in the meanwhile, we've got all the characters from the first movies back! 

Posted by: Wonderduck at 11:56 PM | Comments (11) | Add Comment
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